Understanding the Impact of Mortality Salience on Threat Perception

Abstract

With the development of higher cognitive faculties comes the ability to ask “the big questions.” Some questions, such as “How can life have meaning when everything will eventually die?” are profoundly unsettling. Approaches such as terror management theory have argued that we have tools to suppress the immediate impact of such dilemmas. However, these tools are imperfect, and the dilemma manifests uniquely. Understanding these manifestations is imperative for improving the performance of individuals who work in fields that regularly encounter death. This dissertation examines the impact of mortality salience, or death awareness, on aspects of emotion recognition. Earlier work in this area, have primarily focused on identifying accuracy differences driven by mortality salience. The pattern of accuracy and reaction times were consistent with previous emotional recognition and mortality salience research. Drift diffusion modelling was used to decompose performance indicators into additional measures such as bias towards a decision, the ability to detect evidence, and differences in non-processing time. Significant improvements in the ability to discern emotional indicators were observed for participants who were in anxiety evoking conditions. However, other predicted differences such as decisional biases, non-processing times, and advantages to processing non-threatening features were not found. Potential future avenues of research and applications of the utilized paradigm are discussed.