the aim of this study was to empirically investigate the effect of death-awareness on state mindfulness and state integrative self-knowledge. for existentialists, confrontation with the fact of one’s personal death and tolerance of its inevitable anxiety is the most fundamental conflict of human beings. if such confrontation occurs, it leads to enhancement of one’s self-awareness. empirical tes...

As terrorism continues to raise the specter of death to levels of salience best measured on a global scale, terror management theory (TMT) offers valuable insights for communication theorists regarding the nature and psychology of terrorism. TMT provides a metatheoretic framework, which can help to unify a diverse range of communication theory perspectives. Following a review of TMT’s analysis ...

Terror management theory (TMT) posits that the uniquely human awareness of death gives rise to a potential for debilitating terror, which is averted by the construction and maintenance of cultural worldviews. Over 300 studies have supported hypotheses derived from TMT. In a recent critique of TMT, Navarrete and Fessler (2005) argued that TMT is inconsistent with contemporary evolutionary biolog...

Research derived from terror management theory (TMT) has shown that people's efforts to manage the awareness of death often have deleterious consequences for the individual and society. The present article takes a closer look at the conceptual foundations of TMT and considers some of the more beneficial trajectories of the terror management process. The awareness of mortality can motivate peopl...

Recent terrorist attacks and several terror alerts have increased the need to investigate the behavioral consequences of these threats. This research-in-progress paper focuses on the motivational factors determining usage behavior of social network sites (SNS) in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Based on terror management theory (TMT) and uses and gratifications theory (U&G), this paper argu...

Proponents of Terror Management Theory (TMT) argue that many facets of disgust serve to defend against existential anxiety accompanying cognizance of one’s mortality. Because the passage of time brings death closer, this view predicts that the intensity of disgust elicited by reminders of death should increase with age. Skeptical of TMT, we conducted Internet-based studies using the instrument ...

Terror management theory (TMT) posits that cultural worldviews and self-esteem function to buffer humans from mortality-related anxiety. TMT research has shown that important behaviors are influenced by mortality salience (MS) even when they have no obvious connection to death. However, there has been no attempt to investigate TMT processes in anxious responding. The present research examines t...

Contemplation of death increases support of ingroup ideologies, a result explained by proponents of terror management theory (TMT) as an attempt to buffer existential anxiety. While TMT claims that only death-salient stimuli yield such effects, an evolutionary perspective suggests that increased intergroup bias may occur in response to a wide variety of situations that, in ancestral environment...

Terror management theory (TMT; J. Greenberg, T. Pyszczynski, & S. Solomon, 1986) posits that people are motivated to pursue positive self-evaluations because self-esteem provides a buffer against the omnipresent potential for anxiety engendered by the uniquely human awareness of mortality. Empirical evidence relevant to the theory is reviewed showing that high levels of self-esteem reduce anxie...