Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 17;16(3):e0248699. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248699. eCollection 2021.
Terror Management Theory (TMT) suggests that death-related thoughts activate proximal defense which allows people to suppress or rationalize death awareness. So far there is no direct evidence to support the emotional response in the proximal defense process. The current research aimed to address this issue by examining behavioral (e.g., accuracy and reaction time) and neural responses (e.g., P1 and N400 amplitude) related to emotional arousal following death-related thoughts during proximal defense. Before engaged in emotional words (e.g., anxiety, fear and neutral) judgment task, participants answered questions that referred to emotional and physical changes about death to induce mortality salience (MS). In the control condition, participants received similar instructions concerning the experience of watching TV. Behavioral results showed that longer reaction time of words was seen in control group than MS group. The ERPs results showed that after reminders of death-related thoughts, in condition of MS, fear words elicited larger P1 ERP amplitudes, while the control group did not have this effect, which might reflect that emotional words caused different early attention patterns between MS group and control group. Moreover, compared with control group, larger N400 ERP amplitudes were elicited in condition of MS, suggesting larger cognitive inhibition of words processing caused by emotional reaction. The above results indicate that the early stages after mortality salience will induce fear and anxiety, but soon these negative emotions are suppressed and are at a lower level of accessibility. This result provides electrophysiological evidence for the proximal defense hypothesis of terror management theory.
死亡凸显启动近因防御，近因防御使人们能够压抑或合理化死亡意识。目前尚无直接证据支持近因防御过程中的情绪反应。本研究旨在通过考察与死亡相关的想法引发的近因防御过程中的情绪唤醒相关的行为（例如准确性和反应时）和神经反应（例如 P1 和 N400 波幅），来解决这一问题。在进行情绪词（如焦虑、恐惧和中性词）判断任务之前，参与者需要回答与死亡的情绪和身体变化有关的问题，以引发死亡凸显。在控制条件下，参与者收到了关于观看电视体验的类似说明。行为结果表明，在控制组中，与 MS 组相比，参与者对单词的反应时间更长。ERP 结果表明，在死亡相关思维的提示之后，在 MS 条件下，恐惧词诱发了更大的 P1 ERP 振幅，而控制组则没有这种效果，这可能反映出情绪词在 MS 组和控制组之间引起了不同的早期注意模式。此外，与控制组相比，MS 条件下诱发了更大的 N400 ERP 振幅，表明情绪反应导致对单词处理的认知抑制更大。上述结果表明，死亡凸显后的早期阶段会引起恐惧和焦虑，但很快这些负面情绪就会被压抑，处于较低的可及性水平。这一结果为恐怖管理理论的近因防御假设提供了电生理学证据。
