a Department of Psychology , Texas A&M University , College Station , TX , USA.
Cogn Emot. 2014 Apr;28(3):550-9. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2013.840269. Epub 2013 Oct 1.
Death is inevitable. One way people cope with awareness of death is to focus on the positive things in life. Consistent with this idea, reminders of personal mortality have been found to increase optimism and tune attention towards positive information. The current research tested the hypothesis that persons higher in trait self-control are especially likely to attend to positive (versus negative) stimuli under mortality salience (MS). Participants completed a measure of trait self-control, contemplated their own mortality or a control topic, and then viewed positive and negative affective images while their gaze patterns were recorded. MS increased the attention to positive (versus negative) images among participants higher in trait self-control, whereas those lower in trait self-control exhibited a non-significant trend in the opposite direction. Thus, participants higher in trait self-control showed a positivity bias after contemplating death, which may help explain why they tend to enjoy more positive outcomes in life.
死亡是不可避免的。人们应对死亡意识的一种方式是关注生活中的积极事物。与这一观点一致，人们发现，对个人死亡的提醒会增加乐观情绪，并将注意力调整到积极的信息上。目前的研究检验了这样一个假设，即特质自我控制较高的人在死亡凸显（MS）下特别容易关注积极（而非消极）的刺激。参与者完成了一项特质自我控制的测量，思考自己的死亡或一个控制话题，然后在他们的注视模式被记录的情况下观看积极和消极的情感图像。MS 增加了特质自我控制较高的参与者对积极（而非消极）图像的注意力，而特质自我控制较低的参与者则表现出相反方向的非显著趋势。因此，思考死亡后，特质自我控制较高的参与者表现出积极偏见，这可能有助于解释为什么他们往往在生活中享受更多积极的结果。
