BELIEFS AND MORALSEXISTENTIAL ANGST
One aspect of being human that marks us out from the rest of the animal
kingdom is our knowledge that one day our existence will come to an
abrupt end. People often assume that religion emerged as a way of coping
with this existential awareness, but this is unlikely to be true. While the
idea of salvation is associated with some religions, including Christianity
and Islam, it is unheard of in many others, including heathen traditions.
Also, the idea that religions evolved as a way of providing relief from
existential angst is undermined somewhat by their common focus on
hell and vengeful spirits.
Psychologists seeking to understand how we cope with the reality of
our finite existence have instead focused on the idea that we have an
inbuilt psychological immune-system, one that works tirelessly beneath
our conscious awareness, tuning our mind to a more positive channel
whenever we think about death. This involves finding ways to boost
our self-esteem and connect with a cultural worldview that imbues
life with meaning. This Terror-
management theory, as its known,
is itself part of an emerging field
known as experimental existential
psychology. Supporting the terror-
management approach, there’s
research showing that self-esteem
helps to relieve existential angst,
and also that thoughts of mortality
cause us to seek out self-esteem
boosting opportunities.
Jeff Greenberg at the University
of Arizona, for example, played
participants gory film-clips and
measured the effect this had on
their physiological arousal. He
found that participants were less
affected by the clips if they’d just
had their self-esteem massaged by
falsely-inflated positive feedback
on an IQ test. Other research has
shown that reminding people of
their mortality – by having them Bruce Campbell gets his comeuppance
in Evil Dead II.