Mortality Salience

[MarieB]

What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Mortality Salience?

Personally I'm 17 and as far as I recall I've be death salient(not so sure if that's the right term) ever since I was 13. I wasn't aware of Mortality Salience until now, in the past I thought it was just paranoia. Having learnt of this are there any published research articles on case studies about mortality salience among children? and overall if all people or a group of people became mortality salient, what will be the advantages, disadvantages and impact of it to our society?

 

I'm not so sure if this falls in the category of Psychology or Sociology

 

[iNow]

So long as it doesn't petrify you into a state of catatonia, it could motivate you to do more with the life you have. Basically, it may spur you to action to get as much return on the life you are given before it ultimately ends.

 

It's difficult to point you to specific research, though, as many of your questions are pretty broad. For example, are you curious at what age this awareness becomes common in children, or are you looking to understand the psychological impact on kids when they become aware of the fact that they too will one day die? When you mention the impact on society, are you referencing Western civilization, or eastern cultures, or tribal people's?

 

The advantages and disadvantages of this awareness are really going to vary from person to person. Perhaps if you share your own thoughts on the topic others will jump in to share their views as well.

[MarieB]

Thank you for the advice and I'll narrow down my questions.

I am curious as to what age this awareness becomes common in children especially children in their adolescent years. I am also looking to understand the psychological impact on kids as they become aware of the fact that they will one day die and what their reactions will be. As for impact on society, I'm referencing it to central Asian cultures.

 

Personally I think that making adolescent children reflect on the thought that one day they will die may be helpful. Nowadays I see children not valuing their life by taking their parent's advice and guidance lightly and also by doing drugs. If they understand the value of life in a sense that it must not be taken for-granted but that it is something to be cherished and utilized then maybe the world would be a better place?

[CharonY]

I am not aware of any strong impacts of the general awareness of mortality. For the most part, it is an abstract concept with little impact on daily life. However, there are studies involving direct confrontation with death, often in the context of traumatic experience (e.g. shootings, fatal accidents, or studies on child soldiers). These studies often look at factors such as depression, PTSD and similar outcomes due to these experiences.

But it does not appear that OP is interested in these contexts. The question appears to be more one of individual behaviour, which cannot be answered specifically.

If you tell a kid that he/she will die, chances are that they will carry on as before (realistically, how else could you respond to something that you have so little ultimate influence over). Or you may as likely trigger fear of doing anything to causing extreme reckless behavior ("I am going to die anyway, might as well enjoy what little time I have").

The answers will depend highly on the individual and cannot be answered in a broad study (unless someone finds some correlation with some other traits, but I am not aware of those).

Edited October 9, 2014 by CharonY

[iNow]

So much of the answer depends on the parents, too. Have the parents provided the proper mental foundation and critical thinking skills to the child so they are able to digest the information about their ultimate mortality?

 

Also... How did they share it? Was it aggressive ("You're gonna die one day, too, and don't you forget it!!") or was it gentle ("One day we will all pass away, but that's not what matters... What matters is what we do with our lives while we have them.") or poetic ("That's the only thing that all life has in common, it all eventually ends and that's yet another thing which connects us to all beings in the cosmos.").

 

These variables are all going to play a role in how kids react and ultimately how the sum total of that reaction impacts society at large.

[MonDie]

I just read a good paper, so here goes.

I don't know of any unambiguously beneficial effects, but decades of research have consistently shown that experimental "mortality salience" manipulations produce "worldview defense", i.e. they trigger people to give more exaggerated appraisals of ingroup and outgroup members, and to cling to their cultural norms or mores. Although the debate mostly centers on whether these effects are specific to death cues, which this post will focus on, there may be other effects such as exaggerated appraisals of visual or auditory imagery.

Unconscious Vigilance: Worldview Defense Without Adaptations for Terror, Coalition, or Uncertainty Management (Holbrook, Sousa, & Hahn-Holbrook)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345305/

Terror management theory (TMT) spurred this research. Most terror management research produces the effects by asking people to write about their own death, although other manipulations can work, such as conducting the experiment near a graveyard. Holbrook et al's intro explains that the exploration of alternative hypotheses has identified other successful manipulations, such as writing about being robbed (coalitional hypothesis) or producing a state of uncertainty (uncertainty management hypothesis). Furthermore, Holbrook et al produced similar effects by priming people with angry faces (study 3) or the word "pain" (study 4).

These researchers, in testing their unconconscious vigilance hypothesis, furthermore found that worldview defense is not the only psychological effect. Mortality salience manipulations also produced exaggerated appraisals of pleasing or displeasing sounds (study 1) or photographs (study 2) , measured as the high (favorable) ratings minus the low (unfavorable) ratings.

As explained in the latter two sections of the introduction, mortality salience (MS) manipulations do not produce changes in pulse rate, skin conductance, or reported affect**, yet...

In direct support of the notion that subtle death cues trigger unconscious threat reactions, Arndt, Allen, and Greenberg (2001) correlated subliminal exposure to the word “dead” with rapid flashes of implicit negative affect using facial electromyography. These findings suggest that unconscious threat-detection produces a relatively subtle bodily response, just as one might expect given the consistent lack of self-reported negative affect following mortality-salience induction.

 

**Is it possible that death cues can effect mood in either direction,

increasing dispersion of the data without changing the average?

 

---

No, these phenomena are not distinct to Western culture.

Age-Related Differences in Responses to Thoughts of One’s Own Death: Mortality Salience and Judgments of Moral Transgressions
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2396593/

Many studies have shown that other aversive thoughts do not generate parallel effects; these effects have been found in response to a wide range of MS inductions; and MS effects have been found in a wide range of countries, including the United States, Germany, Italy, Israel, Iran, Turkey, Japan, Korea, and Australian Aborigines (for reviews, see Greenberg et al., 1997; Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003).

Edited November 7, 2014 by MonDie