Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIII. Humanistic/Existential
Theories- May: Existential
Psychology
© The McGraw−Hill^371
Companies, 2009Chapter 12 May: Existential Psychology 365made salient or not and whether there was a delay in the disgust measure or not.
Disgust was measured by the Disgust Sensitivity scale, without its “death” subscale
(Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994). Responses were made on a 9-point Likert scale,
and example items included statements such as “You see maggots on a piece of meat
in an outside garbage pail”; “If I see someone vomit, it makes me sick to my stom-
ach”; and “It would bother me.” Thoughts of death were made salient by asking par-
ticipants to write down the feelings that thoughts of their own death aroused in them.
They were also asked to write down what they think will happen to them when they
physically die. The neutral (nonsalient) condition simply had participants write down
what they would feel watching TV. Delay was manipulated by including a word game
that took 5 minutes to complete for half of the participants. In the delay condition,
participants wrote down thoughts (about death or TV), completed the word game,
and then completed the disgust measure. In the immediate condition, the word game
preceded the writing about death task.
Results of the manipulation supported the hypothesis. Disgust reactions were
greatest after death had been made salient and even more so when there had been a
delay between mortality salience and disgust evaluations. Participants in the neutral
(TV) and delay condition showed the same level of disgust as the participants in the
death salience and immediate condition. Goldenberg and colleagues interpreted
these results as support for the basic terror management assumption that people dis-
tance themselves from animals because animals remind them of their own physical
bodies and death.
Cathy Cox and colleagues have recently extended the findings of Goldenberg
and colleagues by investigating a very specific type of disgust reaction related to our
animal nature: breast-feeding (Cox, Goldenberg, Arndt, & Pyszczynski, 2007). Cox
and colleagues used methods very similar to the previously discussed work on mor-
tality and disgust, where for some participants their own mortality was made salient
and for others it was not. However, instead of having the control condition write
about what they feel when they watch TV, Cox and colleagues had the control partic-
ipants write about the anxiety associated with public speaking. This methodological
change was included in an effort to control for general, non-death-related anxiety (for
many people the idea of public speaking is very anxiety provoking though it is pre-
sumably a very different sort of anxiety than that provoked by the idea of death).
What the researchers found supported the conclusions of an increasing num-
ber of studies in this area that when their own mortality is made more salient, peo-
ple tend to be increasingly disgusted by creaturely behaviors such as breast-feeding
(Cox, Goldenberg, Arndt, & Pyszczynski, 2007; Cox, Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, &
Weise, 2007). The research based on terror management theory and disgust sensitivity
has developed into an impressive body of work that points to the general conclusion
that human disgust, particularly disgust related to human features that remind us of our
animal nature (such as breast-feeding), serves the function of defending against the
existential threat posed by our inevitable death.
Fitness as a Defense Against Mortality Awareness
If thoughts of death are so anxiety provoking and defended against, as most every
study on terror management has demonstrated, one might think it obvious that if