The Effect Of Temperature Change On Death Highlights In Anxiety Buffer

Self-esteem,attachment and cultural worldview for a long time has been thought as main defenses towards mortality salience. However, researches discussing directly how these three defenses interact with each other are few. Relevant researches so far only discussed how one of the defense`s mechanisms worked and there were differences and disputes in specific experimental results and theoretical explanation. In the light of the deficiency of the previous researches, this study introduces anxiety-buffer hypothesis so that we can improve the relevant theory how defenses of self-esteem and cultural worldview towards mortality salience interact with each other through four series of experiments.According to conceptual metaphor theory, interpersonal warmth is understood partly in terms of physical warmth. Under mortality salience, this study is to test self-esteem and metaphor of warmth`s influence on cultural worldview defenses in order that we can investigate whether there exists processing priority between self-esteem defenses and cultural worldview defenses and investigate under which circumstance metaphor of warmth`s mapping will work.This study consists of four experiments. Experiment 1a`s results showed that mortality salience improved participants` evaluations on the interpersonal relationship scale. Besides this condition was regulated by self-esteem defenses. In other words, only individuals with low self-esteem were affected by the mortality salience effect. Experiment 1b revealed that the metaphor of warmth acted as an anxiety buffer of mortality salience when we reduced the environmental temperature. What`s more, in experiment 2, we also verified that self-esteem defenses are processing in priority. Under mortality salience, comparing to participants in a cool room, participants in a warm room made more positive evaluations of the in-groups and more negative evaluations of the out-groups. In details, individuals in a warm room defended mortality salience through in-group bias, while individuals in a cool room defended mortality salience through physical warm stimulations. In addition, this condition is regulated by self-esteem defenses. Only when we take all mentioned above in account will we get the conclusion that death reminders lead to cultural-worldview defenses(e.g., ethnocentrism) and enhanced self-esteem strivings. What`s more, metaphor of warmth acted as an anxiety buffer of mortality salience when we reduced the environmental temperature, which means only when environmental temperature was low, metaphor of warmth would take effect.This study provides an empirical basis for anxiety buffer hypothesis and bridges the difference between conceptual metaphor theory and terror management theory(i.e. metaphors of verticality and cleanness can alleviate the fear of death, etc.). Meanwhile, this study focused on alleviating individuals` persistent anxiety, which provides an empirical basis for individuals with low self-esteem.