Impacts Of Implicit Self-Esteem On Death And Anxiety Under The Mortality Salience

Death has always been a silent issue in this mysterious oriental culture in China,but it does not know the meaning of death nor the value of life.When an individual realizes death,death anxiety can result.Therefore,people always ease the anxiety caused by death through several defense mechanisms.Terror management theory(TMT)argues that self-esteem gains a sense of personal worth by believing in the validity of a human-cultural worldview,or that a person’s life reaches a standard as part of a worldview.So self-esteem is defensive in TMT theory,and its core function as a cushion of human fear.Self-esteem exist explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem two different psychological structure,This study explored the buffering effect of explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem on death anxiety under the influence of death highlighting,and emphasized the role of implicit self-esteem on the defensive level of the cultural world view under the effect of death highlighting.In the first study,the subjects’ explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem were measured.Then the subjects were randomly divided into three groups: death highlighted group,pain highlighted group,and neutral group.Finally,the participants were measured the defensive level of the cultural worldview.Study 2 In order to further explore the role of implicit self-esteem in highlighting the effects of death,half of the participants were randomly selected to reduce the implicit self-esteem,while the other half of the subjects did not change the level of implicit self-esteem.Then through the death of the prominent group,the group of pain was highlighted,the neutral group started measuring the defense of the cultural world outlook.The conclusions are as follows:(1)There was no significant difference between positive emotion score and negative emotion emotion score in the three groups of death highlighting group,pain highlighting group and neutral topic group.Therefore,the highlighting manipulation of death did not affect the emotion of the participants.(2)The prominent pain did not affect the test’s anxiety of death.In the three groups of multiple difference comparison,the death highlighted group and the pain prominent group,the difference between the neutral group was significant,but there was no significant difference between the group of the pain prominent group and the neutral group.(3)Implicit self-esteem can play an adjusting role in explicit self-esteem and defensiveness of the cultural worldview under the prominent effect of death.The cultural worldview under the influence of death highlighting shows that the participants with low implicit level of self-esteem and high level of explicit self-esteem Higher level(4)Implicit self-esteem manipulation achieved the expected effect,implicit self-esteem reduction group subjects were significantly lower than the level of implicit self-esteem non-reduced group and implicit self-esteem unchanged group;(5)The general linear multiple-measure analysis shows that reducing the subject’s implicit self-esteem can improve the defensive level of the cultural world outlook of the participants in the death highlighted group and prove that the implicit self-esteem conforms to the defense mechanism of fear management theory.