The Effect Of Death Anxiety On Temporal Self-appraisal Among College Students:the Role Of Temporal Orientation And Self-esteem

Death,the destruction of the self,is the end of time.Human beings’ self-awareness and higher cognitive ability make them aware of their own certainty of death,and death anxiety arises when an individual’s survival instinct conflicts with this certainty of death.When death anxiety makes people realize that life has an end and time is a limited resource,their perception of time will also change,and this change may be reflected in the orientation of people’s attention to the past,present,and future,as well as in their self-perception and evaluation of the time dimension.Based on previous studies and terror management theory and temporal self-appraisal theory,the authors hypothesize that there are two paths for the influence of death anxiety on the temporal self: an indirect path in which temporal orientation mediates the association between death anxiety and the temporal self;and a direct path in which death anxiety directly influences the temporal self based on self-esteem defense mechanisms and temporal self-appraisal mechanisms.In Study 1,to explore the relationship between death anxiety,temporal orientation,and temporal self,a questionnaire survey was conducted on 408 college students,and they completed the Death Anxiety Scale,the Adolescent Time Attitude Questionnaire,and the Temporal Self-appraisal Questionnaire.The results revealed a suppression effect of negative temporal orientation between death anxiety and temporal self.On the indirect path of death anxiety → negative temporal orientation(present/future)→temporal self(present/future),death anxiety significantly negatively predicted temporal self-appraisal;on the direct path of death anxiety → temporal self,death anxiety significantly positively predicted temporal self-appraisal.In Study 2,to explore the direct relationship between death anxiety and explicit temporal self,130 college student subjects were grouped by self-esteem level and randomly assigned to different priming tasks(death salience/pain salience),and then were asked to assess the conformity of adjectives for the past,present,and future self.The results found that among high self-esteem subjects,the death bumping group rated the temporal self significantly higher than the pain salience group’s temporal self-appraisal.In Study 3,to further explore the effect of death anxiety on implicit temporal self,61 college subjects with high self-esteem levels were randomly assigned to different initiation tasks and then asked to perform a Go/No-go association task to measure implicit temporal self attitudes.The results found that in the death salience group,subjects’ sensitivity(d’)of associations between past self and negative traits were significantly higher than that of associations between past self and positive traits;subjects’ sensitivity(d’)of associations between future self and negative traits were significantly lower than that of associations between future self and positive traits.The three studies mentioned above led to the following main conclusions:First,death anxiety indirectly negatively predicts temporal self-appraisal through negative temporal orientation,and death anxiety directly positively predicts temporal self-appraisal.Second,relative to pain salience,death salience enhances explicit temporal self-appraisal in individuals with high self-esteem levels.Finally,individuals with high self-esteem levels under death salience unconsciously hold negative attitudes toward their past selves and positive attitudes toward their future selves relative to pain salience.