Chapter 11 May: Existential Psychology 347between death awareness and attachment-seeking and have found that if people
imagine a separation from a romantic loved one, this increases the accessibility of
death-related thoughts in their minds (Florian et al., 2002).
Cathy Cox and Jamie Arndt (2012) sought to explore the question of why
people are motivated to form and nurture close relationships when they are
reminded of their mortality. Their hypothesis, supported by several studies, was
grounded in the Rogerian construct of positive regard. They tested whether it is
our perceptions of close others’ positive regard for us that explains why relation-
ships and closeness buffer against death anxiety. In other words, as Carl Rogers
(1959) argued, our sense that others care for and prize us becomes incorporated
into our personal feeling of positive self-regard, and this, in turn, contributes to a
sense that we are a significant person in the world. Cox and Arndt (2012) examined
whether this perceived positive regard from close relationships is what brings relief
from the anxiety of nonexistence or insignificance.
Cox and Arndt’s (2012) first studies manipulated an independent variable of
death reminder or control. In this case, students were asked to either “briefly
describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you and jot
down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you phys-
ically die and once you are physically dead” versus parallel questions about an
unexpected event. Students in the death reminder condition exaggerated how pos-
itively their romantic partners saw them, compared to the control unexpected
events condition. Furthermore, they found that students’ perceived positive regard
from their romantic partner predicted their expression of more commitment to that
partner after a death reminder.
In yet another study, Cox and Arndt asked half of the participants to answer
true or false to a series of statements assessing their fear of death (e.g., “I am very
much afraid to die”) and the other half the same questions assessing a non-death
control arena (e.g., “I am very much afraid of dental work”). Following this manip-
ulation, a second independent variable was manipulated. Here participants were
randomly assigned to either visualize a time when their romantic partner held a
positive view of them (“write about a time when your romantic partner made you
feel good about yourself”) or a negative view (“write about a time when your
romantic partner did not make you feel good about yourself”). Finally, all partici-
pants completed a word-stem task that measures the accessibility of death-related
thoughts (e.g., GRA can be completed either as “grave” or “grape”). Results of
this study indicated that when death was primed and students thought of a time
when their partner had negative regard for them, they scored higher on death
related thoughts, compared to those who were reminded of death but thought of
their partner’s positive regard for them. In other words, perceived positive regard
from one’s romantic partner buffers against the increased accessibility of death
thoughts that can be engendered by being reminded of ones’ mortality.
Finally, Cox and Arndt examined how attachment style interacts with mortal-
ity salience to influence which relationships (romantic partners or parents) people
turn to for bolstering their feelings of positive regard. In this case, participants’
attachment styles were assessed, they were given the death versus unexpected event
manipulation, and were asked to rate themselves on a series of positive and negative
adjective traits from the perspective of how their romantic partner evaluates them