The Effect Of Nostalgia Type On Reducing Death Anxiety Caused By Mortality Salience In College Students

The terror management theory focuses on how human beings respond when confronted with death,believing that people can buffer the anxiety caused by death-related threat,such as the meaningful cultural worldviews rooted in their lives,or to maintain the sense of value of self,and carefully manage their own relationships and so on.Study by Arndt et al.further confirmed the buffer effect of nostalgia on death anxiety.Based on series of foreign experimental paradigms,this study explores the buffering effect of nostalgia on death anxiety under the culture of Chinese background.And to further explore the buffering effect of individual nostalgia and collective nostalgia against death-related anxiety respectively and their differences too.This study assumes that nostalgia can function as the buffering effect against death-related anxiety,that is,when death is salient,the DTA of nostalgia group(nostalgia is activated)is lower than that of the control group(initiating daily life events);and considering that China is a country that believes in collectivism,we further assume that individual nostalgia and collective nostalgia can also work as a buffering effect against MS,and maybe there is difference between them,in other words,when death is salient,the collective nostalgia function better than individual nostalgia when DTA is tested.Method:In the first study,participants were randomly divided into two groups.Through active recall,participants in the experimental group were reminded to recall nostalgic events,to start the nostalgia of the subjects,and the control group were asked to recall the daily life events(nostalgia is silent).All participants were randomly assigned to MS group or toothache group,and then all participants were distracted by a delaying task,and finally use a residual word completion task to measure the DTA of all participants.In experiment 2,since experiment 1 has confirmed the terror management function of nostalgia among Chinese participants,this experiment will further study the terror management function of individual nostalgia and collective nostalgia.The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of individual nostalgia and collective nostalgia on death anxiety respectively.The participants were randomly divided into three groups: individual nostalgia group,collective nostalgia group,control group.Subsequently,the individual nostalgia in the individual nostalgia group and the collective nostalgia in the collective nostalgia group were initiated respectively.The control group recalled the daily life events and did with no nostalgia initiated.Then all the participants were randomly assigned to the MS group or the toothache group,and then all participants completed a distraction task,and finally use the residual word completion task to measure the DTA of all participants.The results are as follows:1.The operation of nostalgia activating is valid,independent sample t test,shows that nostalgia group and non-nostalgia group scores significantly different.2.The operation of MS is effective.After independent sample t test in experiment one,there was significant difference in DTA between MS group and non-MS group.3.The initiation of individual nostalgia and of collective nostalgia are effective.After the back testing,it was found that there was a significant difference in DTA between individual nostalgia group and collective nostalgia group than that of the daily events group.4.There is no significant difference between individual nostalgia and collective nostalgia in terror management ability.Back testing found no significant difference in DTA score between individual nostalgia group and collective nostalgia group.The experimental results basically verify the hypotheses we put forward.Nostalgia indeed has the effect of buffering the anxiety caused by death-related threat.However,there is no significant difference in the DTA between the individual nostalgia group and the collective nostalgia group.The possible reason is that the difference in starting materials is not significant enough.Later studies can further complete the nostalgic start-up materials,design a more standard task of distraction,the highlight of the study is adopting the MS materials more fitted with the Chinese culture,and further explore the mechanisms and differences between individual nostalgia and collective nostalgia in buffering for the anxiety of death.