Emotional Research On Fear Management Defense Mechanism

Most studies of terror management theory have overemphasized tripartite psychological defenses mechanisms in dealing with the distal defense (cultural worldview, self-esteem and close relationship), while ignoring proximal defense. And have not found any change of emotion after mortality salience. So, We would like to explore emotion and emotion regulation on the proximal defense of terror nanagement theory. We recruited the young people and middle-aged people as participants. The research can be separated into three studies. Study 1 applied the lexical judgment task to explore the change of people’s emotion and age difference after mortality salience. In study 2, a manipulation to boost the positive or negative emotion was conducted to investigate the effects on terror management theory (Death-Thought Accessibility, DTA). In study 3, we used sentence unscrambling task to trigging the goal of emotion regulation, and measured the type of participants’emotion regulation. Then we investigated the influence of goal of emotion regulation on cultural worldview defense after mortality salience.The results revealed compared to other groups, mortality salience produced an automatic coping response that involved tuning to positive emotional information. And old people more like to choose positive words. Boost positive emotion after mortality salience can decrease the DTA; relative to the people who were not trigged by the goal of emotion regulation,the increasing cultural worldview defense of the people who were trigged by the goal of emotion regulation are more after mortality salience; there is no differences among the different type of emotion regulation. Findings were discussed in light of terror management theory, emotion, and emotion regulation theory. And hopefully identify directions of future research.