Implicit Self - Esteem Of The Death Anxiety Buffer Effect

Terror management theory(TMT) proposes that self-esteem as a defense against the fear of death. Consistent with this view, research has demonstrated that mortality salience increases the need for self-esteem, as evidenced by increases self –esteem striving and a tendency toward self-enhancement. More complete evidence would consist of showing not only that mortality salience increases defensive and self-serving biases but also that self-esteem moderates reactions to mortality salience(MS). If self-esteem buffers against the psychological threat of death, then people with high self-esteem should be less defensive in response to mortality salience than are people with low self-esteem based on the perspective of anxiety-buffering hypothesis of self-esteem. The most well-known use of self-esteem within the TMT literature is as an independent variable. In particular, researchers assess self-esteem prior to the experimental manipulation and then examine whether a priori levels of self-esteem moderate the impact of the mortality salience manipulation. The main prediction of TMT is that self-esteem, when measured in this way, essentially serves as a buffer in the sense that the threat of MS is postulated to be less if participants’ level of self-esteem is relatively high than if it is low. In the meta-analysis reported by Buke et al.(2010), we could not locate any that directly examined the impact of the MS task on explicit levels of self-esteem based on mortality salience hypothesis. Verify the anxiety buffering function of implicit self-esteem from the perspective of mortality salience hypothesis is one aim of this Thesis. The anxiety-buffering hypothesis of self-esteem proposed by TMT is generally correct, but it is crucial to consider the type of self-esteem. Another type of self-esteem is implicit self-esteem, which is relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness and distinct from explicit self-esteem. TMT researchers have tended to focus on self-reported explicit self-esteem, which is prone to self-presentational biases and cognitive distortion. Implicit self-esteem is relatively less prone to self-presentational biases and therefore may reflect a less distorted evaluation of self. High implicit self-esteem may be more likely than high explicit self-esteem to buffer the effects of mortality salience because high implicit self-esteem represents a more automatic or spontaneous positive self-evaluation. Since few TMT researchers focus on the role of implicit self-esteem in terror management mechanism. Another aim of this Thesis is to fill this gap.Three studies were taken to testify the anxiety buffering function of both explicit and implicit self-esteem. Based on mortality salience hypothesis, study 1 directly examined the impact of the MS task on explicit and implicit levels of self-esteem. If both of them is a terror management mechanism, the participants with MS manipulation should have high self-esteem than participants with no-MS manipulation. Study 2 from a perspective of anxiety-buffering hypothesis to verify the function of both self-esteem, participants with high levels of self-esteem should be less defensive in response to mortality salience. Because MS manipulation show no effect on implicit self-esteem in study 1, but implicit self-esteem moderation the reaction to mortality salience in study 2, study 3 measure the implicit self-esteem in different duration to find out whether the MS manipulation affect the implicit self-esteem. Our studies found that both explicit and implicit self-esteem is anxiety buffering mechanism. In particular, both implicit and explicit moderate the reaction to MS, MS increased the culture worldview defense but only among participants with the combination of low implicit and high explicit self-esteem or medium implicit and high explicit self-esteem. Mortality salience increases explicit self-esteem in distal defense, but increases implicit self-esteem before distal defense.