The Influence Of Mortality Salience On Family Relationship Closeness

Everyone has to accept mortality as the terminal point of their lives,and they aware that at certain situations.Mortality Salience is one of the fundamental postulates of the Terror Management Theory,which refers to evoking thoughts about mortality by showing stimuli associated with death.The effect of Mortality Salience is also derived from The Terror Management Theory,which states that under the condition of a mortality reminding,The individual,for the purpose of fear managing,will increase the need for some psychological mechanism that can relieve death anxiety.According to Terror Management Theory,people are born with the eager to be alive and the fear of mortality.However,they can handle the terror for mortality through anxiety-buffer systems,which include close relationship.Most researches studying the effect of mortality salience on close relationship focused on the protecting effect of romantic relationship.However,close relationships with family and friends may be equally important to us as well as the relationship our couple or romantic partner.Chinese people living in a country with rich culture related to collectivism and family may regard close relationship with their family members as one of their important buffer mechanisms for relieving death anxiety.Based on that,this paper further explores whether family relationship closeness can also be an important resource for fear management under the condition of mortality salience.Is the The effect of Mortality Salience reflected on the change of family relationship closeness evaluation and the attention bias to words referring to their family members?In order to answer the above questions,this paper revised the uni-dimensional relationship closeness scale(URCI)as a scale for family relationship closeness rating.Meanwhile,we designed two experiments and collected the subjective perception data and objective behavior data of the participants to study the effect of mortality salience on family close relationship.Experiment 1 was a mixed design of 3(subject group: pain reminder group,neutral reminder group and mortality salience group)×2(measure time: pretest,post-test).The subject group acted as a between-subject variable,the measure time acted as an inter-subject variable,and the score of family relationship closeness scale acted as dependent variable.To be more specifically,experiment 1 was designed to verify that the individual’s subjective evaluation of family relationship closeness was significantly increased under the condition of mortality salience compared with neutral reminder condition and pain reminder condition.Experiment 2 was a one factor design with subject group acted as a between-subject variable.There were 3 subject groups: pain reminder group,neutral reminder group and mortality salience group.The attention bias index,attention alert index and attention maintenance index acted as dependent variable.And Experiment 2 was designed to verify that,compared with neutral and pain reminder conditions,individuals in the condition of mortality salience had a attention bias towards the word stimulus of family members,which was manifested as attention alert bias.Thus,family close relationship also has the function of managing death fear and can also act as a buffer for death anxiety.The research results indicate that the effect of Mortality Salience also showed in forms of the change of family relationship closeness,which is reflected on the significant enhancement of family relationship closeness and the avoidance attention bias towards words referred to family members after mortality salience.Among all the results,the results about the impact of mortality salience on family relationship closeness are in line with the hypothesis of this article.While the results about the impact of mortality salience on the attention bias to the words about family members were not consistent with our hypothesis.On the contrary,it was opposite to the hypothesis of this article.Therefore,this paper also compared and analyzed the research results with the previous related researches,and elaborated in the comprehensive discussion section.Future studies can repeat our research with different samples,or screening extreme subjects in the dimension of family relationship closeness and attention bias.The results of this study can also be verified by more detailed and rigorous experimental design.