1. THE EFFECT OF TRAUMATIC
SYMPTOMOLOGY, MORTALITY
SALIENCE, AND SELF-
AFFIRMATION ON THE EFFECTIVE
MANAGEMENT OF DEATH-
THOUGHT ACCESSIBILITY

2. TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
 TMT (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) holds that a dual-
component system emerged to help people manage their awareness of
mortality by:
a) striving for a sense of personal value (i.e., self-esteem) within
b) a symbolically permanent cultural worldview.
 Thus, TMT argues that people can manage the awareness of mortality by
maintaining the perception that one is an object of value in a seemingly
permanent system of meaning.

3. MORTALITY SALIENCE HYPOTHESIS
 Essentially states that if a psychological structure (i.e., cultural worldview)
provides protection against thoughts of death, then priming people of their own
mortality should increase their need for these psychological structures.
 If these psychological structures provide protection from death-related
thoughts, and then become weakened, these thoughts should become more
accessible to our consciousness.
DEATH THOUGHT ACCESSIBILITY HYPOTHESIS

4. BUFFERING DEATH-THOUGHT
ACCESSIBILITY VIA SELF-AFFIRMATION
 If cultural worldviews and self-esteem function to help manage the
awareness of mortality, then affirming the worldview and bolstering self-
esteem should buffer against death-thought accessibility (DTA).
 Prior research shows that mortality salience leads to more death-thought
accessibility, unless first affirming one’s belief systems and personal value
(self-affirmation; Schmeichel & Martens, 2005).

5. TRAUMA AND ANXIETY BUFFER
DISRUPTION
 Traumatic life experiences disrupt one’s anxiety buffer functioning thus:
 breaking down individuals’ sense of security in their worldviews
(Abdollahi et al, 2011).
 What was once an effective buffer against the awareness of mortality is likely
no longer able to provide and serve the same buffering function.

6. HYPOTHESES
 Among low-trauma individuals, we
expect the worldview buffer system to
function effectively: MS should increase
DTA in the no-self-affirmation
condition, but that self-affirmation will
function to buffer against that increase.
►Among high-trauma individuals, we
expect the worldview buffer to be
disrupted: MS should increase DTA in
the no-self-affirmation condition and
in the self-affirmation condition
(indicating that it no longer serves to
buffer against increased DTA).

7. METHOD
 Participants
 Recruited via Turk Prime (Amazon Turk) to obtain a non-clinical sample. Participants
completed the following: trauma symptomology premeasure, MS manipulation, self-
affirmation manipulation, death-though accessibility dependent variable, and a
demographic questionnaire.
 Trauma Symptomology
 The Post-Traumatic Stress Checklist –Civilian (PCL-C) is a 17-item self-report measure
used to gauge the severity of the trauma symptoms related to a single event. It assesses
all the criteria for PTSD based on the DSM-IV, the daily functioning of the individual, and
their experiences in the immediate past (or an otherwise specified time frame).
Participants scoring a 25 and below were classified as low trauma, whereas a score of 44
and above classified the participant as high trauma.

8. METHOD
 MS Manipulation
 Next, one of two short-answer style questions will be presented to manipulate
mortality salience.
 MS: participants will be presented with two open-ended prompts: “please briefly describe the
emotions that your own death arouses in you” and “jot down, as specifically as you can, what
you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead”
 Control: participants in the control condition will receive the same two prompts, but they will
ask about dental pain instead of mortality.
 Self-Affirmation Manipulation
 Next, one of two tasks will induce self-affirmation:
 Self-Affirmation: participants will rank order a dozen values, and then write about their top-
ranked value and how they excel at it.
 No Self-Affirmation:
 Participants will rank order a dozen jelly-bean flavors, and then write about their favorite flavor.

9. DEATH-THOUGHT ACCESSIBILITY
 DTA was assessed using a word-stem completion task (Greenberg, et
al., 1994), whereby six word stems could be completed with either a
neutral or a death-related word.
For example: GRA _ _ could be completed as GRANT or GRAVE
COFF _ _ could be completed as COFFEE or COFFIN

10. RESULTS
 Methods prescribed by Aiken and West (1991) were followed to regress death-thought accessibility on the Trauma
symptom 2 (low vs. high) x 2 (MS vs. control) x 2 (self-affirmation vs. control) design.
 The following patterns were found: