BRIEF REPORT

When death thoughts lead to death fears: Mortality

salience increases death anxiety for individuals
who lack meaning in life
Clay Routledge and Jacob Juhl
North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota, USA
Research derived from terror management theory demonstrates that subtle reminders of mortality
increase strivings for meaning. It is argued that such strivings reflect efforts to prevent the anxiety
that death reminders may otherwise cause. However, no research has directly tested the assertions
that subtle mortality primes increase death anxiety and perceptions of meaning in life moderate this
effect. The current study examined these predictions. Meaning in life was measured, death cognition
primed, and death anxiety assessed. A mortality prime increased death anxiety, but only for
individuals who lack perceptions of meaning in life. Theoretical and applied implications are
discussed.
Keywords: Mortality salience; Death anxiety; Meaning; Well-being.
Humans are self-aware, abstract thinking, and
temporally conscious organisms and thus possess
the requisite cognitive capacities to fully contem-
plate their mortality. Since humans, like other
animals, strive for self-preservation, the realisation
that death is certain has the potential to cause
great anxiety (Becker, 1973). Further, this aware-
ness of eventual demise cannot simply be avoided
because life is full of situations that render salient
human fragility and transience (e.g., doctor ap-
pointments, terrorist threat warnings, news
broadcasts). This poses the question: Do situa-
tional cues that heighten death awareness increase
death anxiety? Further, if so, why do people often
seem relatively unaffected by reminders of mor-
tality? Though life is full of experiences that make
death salient, many people navigate these situa-
tions relatively free of distress. Therefore, if
reminders of mortality can increase death anxiety,
who is most susceptible to this effect, and who
appears to be insulated from it?
According to terror management theory (TMT;
Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991) con-
ditions that remind people of mortality have the
potential to increase death anxiety. However, the
theory asserts that people can circumvent this
Correspondence should be addressed to Clay Routledge, Minard Hall, North Dakota State University, Fargo ND, 58108, USA.
E-mail: Clay.Routledge@ndsu.edu
COGNITION AND EMOTION
2010, 24 (5), 848854
848 # 2009 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
http://www.psypress.com/cogemotion DOI:10.1080/02699930902847144
anxiety by feeling like their lives are imbued with
meaning and purpose. In other words, the inevit-
ability of death is not as threatening if people
believe that their existence, though transient, is
meaningful and serves a greater purpose. In
support of this assertion, a large body of experi-
mental research indicates that when the aware-
ness of death is heightened (mortality salience),
people respond with efforts to reinforce a sense
that human life is meaningful (see Pyszczynski,
Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003). For example,
different mortality-salience inductions (e.g., death
writing task, presence of funeral home in visual
field, subliminal death primes) have been shown
to increase prejudice against those who subscribe
to different meaning-providing cultural belief
systems (Greenberg et al., 1990), belief in afterlife
and divine intervention (Norenzayan & Hansen,
2006), denial of similarity to other animals
(Goldenberg et al., 2001), and dislike of modern
art that undermines perceptions of meaning
(Landau, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, &
Martens, 2006). Though studies such as these
indicate that mortality salience promotes efforts to
perceive human life as meaningful, they do not
provide evidence that these meaning-related de-
fences serve to mitigate mortality salience induced
death anxiety, or that reminders of mortality even
increase death anxiety. Research by Greenberg
and colleagues (2003) provided clearer evidence
for these assertions by demonstrating that giving
participants a placebo purported to prevent the
experience of anxiety eliminates the typical effect
of mortality salience leading to strivings for
meaning. That is, when participants believed
that they were inoculated from future anxiety
they did not feel compelled to defend the cultural
beliefs that provide a broader sense of meaning
after death thoughts were primed. However, to
date, no research has directly assessed whether or
not mortality salience actually increases death
anxiety or whether or not feelings of meaning
mitigate this potential effect. The current study
explored these questions.
Specifically, the current research tested the
hypothesis that priming thoughts of death would
heighten death anxiety for people who lacked
feelings of meaning in life but not for people who
possessed such feelings. To test this hypothesis, in
the current study, meaning in life was measured
and mortality salience manipulated. Subsequently,
death anxiety was assessed.
METHOD
Participants and procedure
Sixty introductory psychology students (33 fe-
males, 24 males, 3 unidentified) participated in a
study called Personality and Attitudes. They
completed all materials in partitioned cubicles in
the order described below. Upon completion of
the study materials participants were fully
debriefed.
Materials
Meaning in Life (MIL). The MIL measure
(Ryff, 1989) consisted of the four items: My
personal existence is purposeful and meaningful;
In life, I have clear goals and aims; I have clear
goals and a satisfying purpose in life; and
I regard my ability to find a meaning, purpose,
and mission in life as being great rated on a
5-point scale (1disagree strongly; 5agree
strongly; a.70). These items were taken from
the purpose in life subscale of a larger measure of
different dimensions of psychological well-being.
Ryff (1989) described the purpose in life subscale
as reflecting the extent to which one sees ones
life, past and present, as meaningful.
Experimental condition. Participants received
either the mortality salience (MS) or control
manipulation (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon,
Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). Specifically, they
responded to two open-ended statements: Briefly
describe the emotions that the thought of your
own death arouses in you and Jot down, as
specifically as you can, what you think will happen
to you physically as you die and once you are
physically dead. The control condition consisted
of parallel statements regarding the experience of
failing an important exam, so as to control for
general elicitation of self-threatening negative
MORTALITY SALIENCE INCREASES DEATH ANXIETY
COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2010, 24 (5) 849
thoughts. As in previous research, the experi-
mental induction was followed with a puzzle
distraction task (Greenberg, Arndt, Simon,
Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 2000).
Affect. The 20-item Positive and Negative Af-
fect Scheme (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Telle-
gen, 1988) consisted of 10 positive affect items
(PA; a.85) and 10 negative affect items (NA;
a.88).
Death Anxiety (DA). The DA measure (Lester,
1990) consisted of the 8-item death of self
subscale from the Revised CollettLester Fear
of Death Scale in which participants indicated
how anxious they were about different aspects of
death (e.g., the shortness of life, the total
isolation of death) on a 5-point scale (1not
anxious; 5very anxious; a.87). The full scale
contains subscales relating to the process of dying
and the death and process of others dying. In the
current study, only the fear of death of self
subscale was administered so as to measure
specifically anxiety about personal mortality. The
scale has been shown to be highly correlated with
other measures of death anxiety and sensitive to
state changes in death anxiety (Mooney &
OGorman, 2001).
RESULTS
There were no significant effects involving gender
(ps.25). To test the predictions that mortality
salience would increase death anxiety but only
for those lacking meaning in life, regression
equations were computed in which MS (dummy
coded) and MIL (centred) were entered in the
first step and the interaction in the second step.
There were no significant main effects for MS
(B0.15, SE0.28, t1.07, p.30) or MIL
(B0.28, SE0.29, t1.53, p.13) in
the first step. There was, however, a signifi-
cant interaction in the second step, B0.48,
SE0.57, t1.99, p.05 (see Figure 1).
Predicted means tests were conducted at low
and high levels of MIL (91 SD) to further probe
the nature of this interaction. At low levels
of MIL, MS, relative to the control condition,
was associated with increased DA, B0.41,
SE0.39, t2.18, p.03. There was no
Figure 1. The effects of meaning in life and mortality salience on death anxiety. Note: Higher scores reect higher levels of death anxiety
and meaning in life.
ROUTLEDGE AND JUHL
850 COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2010, 24 (5)
significant effect of MS at high levels of MIL,
B0.13, SE0.40, t0.67, p.51.
Furthermore, simple slope tests revealed that
within the MS condition, higher MIL scores
were associated with decreased DA, B0.48,
SE0.41, t2.53, p.02. No such relation-
ship was found within the control condition, B
0.04, SE0.39, t0.24, p.81.
Potential effects of MS and MIL on positive
and negative affect were also considered. As in
previous research, MS had no significant effect on
PA or NA (ps.80). There was a main effect of
MIL on PA such that higher MIL was associated
with increased PA, B0.27, SE0.20, t2.09,
p.04. However, there was no significant inter-
action between MS and MIL (p.85) on PA.
There was also no significant main or interaction
effects on NA (ps.22) and controlling for NA
and PA did not impact the previously reported
significant interaction between MS and MIL,
B0.46, SE0.58, t2.04, p.05.
DISCUSSION
The current study provides the first direct evi-
dence that subtle mortality primes lead to death
anxiety for individuals not inoculated by existen-
tial meaning. People who indicated that their lives
were full of meaning did not respond to mortality
salience with increased death anxiety. Individuals
lacking this existential resource did evidence
increased death anxiety after thoughts of death
were primed, and this effect was specific to death
anxiety as generalised negative affect could not
account for it. In addition, when death was
salient, meaning was inversely related to death
anxiety. These findings have important theoretical
and applied implications.
The current study contributes critical empirical
evidence to underlying assumptions of TMT.
A number of hypotheses derived from TMT have
received a great amount of empirical support. For
example, research has shown that when meaning-
providing structures (e.g., cultural worldviews) are
undermined, the accessibility of death thoughts
increases (e.g., Schimel, Hayes, Williams, &
Jahrig, 2007). When death thoughts are made
accessible, people cling to and defend these
meaning-providing structures (e.g., Rosenblatt
et al., 1989). When feelings of broader purpose
and meaning are bolstered prior to a mortality-
salience induction, people do not respond to
thoughts of death with further psychological
defences (e.g., Dechesne et al., 2003). When
mortality is salient, people dislike stimuli found
to be meaningless (Landau et al., 2006) and will
not use cultural icons to complete a problem-
solving task if doing so denigrates the meaning of
that icon (e.g., using a crucifix as a hammer;
Greenberg, Simon, Porteus, Pyszczynski, & So-
lomon, 1995). All of these findings are consistent
with the assertions that certain psychological and
social structures imbue life with existential mean-
ing and this sense of meaning shields people from
the potential psychological consequences of mor-
tality awareness. However, prior to the current
research, a direct test of the effect of mortality
salience on death anxiety had not been conducted.
That is, though research has demonstrated that
highly arousing conditions with death imagery
lead to generalised anxiety (Greenberg et al.,
1992), no studies had tested the assertion that
subtle reminders of death, the types of primes
that lead to increased meaning seeking, can
lead to increased death anxiety, and particularly
among those lacking the psychological protec-
tion afforded by perceptions of broader meaning.
As previously noted, Greenberg and colleagues
(2003) demonstrated that people will not engage
the psychological defences that affirm a sense of
meaning in response to mortality salience primes
if they are led to believe that they are immune
from the experience of anxiety. This finding
strongly suggests that reminders of mortality can
lead to death anxiety but does not directly test this
assertion. The current research built upon Green-
berg and colleagues finding in two distinct ways
in order to directly test basic tenets of TMT.
First, the current study directly examined whether
or not reminders of mortality increase death
anxiety. Second, the current study directly as-
sessed perceptions of meaning in life. Whereas
previous research has relied heavily on the
MORTALITY SALIENCE INCREASES DEATH ANXIETY
COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2010, 24 (5) 851
examination of peoples efforts to bolster and
defend the psychological and social structures
(e.g., cultural worldviews) that ultimately imbue
life with meaning, the current research directly
assessed to what extent individuals perceive life as
meaningful. Thus, the findings of the current
study complement the findings of Greenberg et al.
(2003) and advance the broader research on terror
management processes to indicate that percep-
tions of meaning in life protect people from the
anxiety that contemplations of mortality may
otherwise foster.
The current study also contributes to a wide
range of research that indicates that meaning in life
plays an important role in adaptive human func-
tioning. Perceiving life as meaningful is a critical
component of psychological health and well-being
(King & Napa, 1998; Zika & Chamberlain, 1992).
For example, a lack of meaning in life is a predictor
of depression (Wong, 1998) and maladaptive
health behaviour (Harlowe, Newcomb, & Bentler,
1986). Furthermore, feelings of purpose and mean-
ing in life predict psychological well-being at
almost every developmental stage fromadolescence
to late adulthood (Reker, Peacock, & Wong,
1987). Just as a sense of meaning in life has been
shown to aid in coping with life stress (e.g.,
Mascaro & Rosen, 2006), the current research
suggests that perceptions of meaning assist indivi-
duals in coping with the realisation that life is
finite. Meaning in life helps ensure that death
thoughts do not turn into death fears because to
have a meaningful life is to be more than the sumof
ones biological parts (Becker, 1973). That is, as
many existential thinkers have noted (see Solomon
et al., 1991), being part of something larger,
more enduring, and of greater significance than
ones physical existence provides feelings of death
transcendence.
The current research has a number of limita-
tions. For example, for the sake of brevity, the
measure of meaning consisted of only four items.
Though this measure has been demonstrated to be
a reliable and valid assessment of meaning in life
(see Ryff, 1989), future research should utilise
additional measures of meaning. Also, in the
current study, no baseline measure of death
anxiety was administered so as not to interfere
with the experimental manipulation. Future re-
search could, however, assess pre-existing levels of
death anxiety some time prior to the experiment.
However, since random assignment was used in
the current research we are somewhat confident
that baseline levels of death anxiety do not
account for the observed significant differences
between conditions.
The current findings also suggest a number of
exciting future research directions. In the current
study, meaning in life was measured, not manipu-
lated. Just as life is full of situations that render
death salient, life is full of experiences that both
challenge and reinforce perceptions of meaning.
Future studies should investigate the extent to
which undermining and bolstering perceptions of
meaning impact death anxiety when death is
salient. In addition, if death primes increase death
anxiety for those who lack sufficient meaning in
life, situational cues that prime death may com-
promise psychological and physical health for
those who do not perceive life as meaningful.
Future research should consider the extent to
which meaning in life also contributes to positive
physical and psychological health outcomes when
people are in situations in which they must
confront their mortality (e.g., cancer screenings).
For example, recently Goldenberg, Routledge,
and Arndt (in press) found that conditions that
reminded people of their similarity to other
animals led women to perceive a cancer screening
(mammogram) as more physically and psycholo-
gically uncomfortable. Did this threat to the belief
that humans are more significant than other
animals undermine perceptions of meaning, thus
making the cancer-screening experience more
threatening? Would bolstering perceptions of
meaning increase the likelihood that individuals
would adhere to recommended health screenings,
screenings that are potentially anxiety-provoking
because they remind people of their mortality?
Future research should explore these questions as
there could be many applied implications based on
the basic assertion supported in the current
research that when facing death-priming life
ROUTLEDGE AND JUHL
852 COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2010, 24 (5)
events meaning in life buffers individuals from
death anxiety.
Manuscript received 13 November 2008
Revised manuscript received 27 January 2009
Manuscript accepted 20 February 2009
First published online 18 May 2009
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