Mortality Salience Weakens Retention Of Self-related Items Encoded: Behavioral And Neurophysiological Evidence

Recent research has shown that thoughts of one’s own death make individuals avoid behaviors that induce self-awareness and decrease the brain activity underlying the sentient feeling of oneself. The current work further investigated whether making mortality salient(MS) weakens the brain activity in response to the self-referential processing and the subsequent recognition of self-related information. Using a self-reference task, Experiment 1 examined brain activity underlying MS effects on self-referential processing by recording event-related potentials to trait adjectives associated with the self and a celebrity during trait judgments. Relative to the negative affect priming(NA) and neutral priming, MS priming significantly decreased the amplitudes of an early frontal positivity at 180-300 ms in response to self-related trait adjectives. Experiment 2 showed behavioral evidence that, relative to NA priming, MS priming impaired recognition of trait adjectives that were associated with the self in a foregoing trait judgment task. Our findings suggest that death-related thoughts decrease brain activity underlying encoding of self-related information and lead to impaired recognition of self-related information.