Research Article From Terror to Joy Automatic Tuning to Positive Affective Information Following Mortality Salience

ABSTRACT—Reminders of death tend to produce strong cognitive and behavioral responses, but little or no emo-tional response. In three experiments, mortality salience produced an automatic coping response that involved tuning to positive emotional information. Subjects showed increased accessibility of positive emotional information (Experiments 1 and 3) and gave more weight to positive emotion in their judgments of word similarity (Experiment 2) after contemplating death than after thinking about dental pain. This automatic coping response was found both after a delay (Experiments 1 and 2) and directly after themortality-saliencemanipulation (Experiment 3), which suggests that the copingprocess begins immediately. Tuning to positive emotional information in response to mortality saliencewas unconscious and counterintuitive (Experiment 3). These findings shed light on the coping process that ensues immediately followingmortality salience and help to explain why a delay is often necessary to produce effects in line with terror management theory. Most living things strive to continue living. Humans are un-usually aware of their mortality, and intuitively one would suppose that the thought of death should evoke a wave of fear and anxiety. Becker (1973) proposed that such a ‘‘denial of death’ ’ is the basis for much human motivation, and Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon (1986) elaborated this insight into a systematic psychological theory, known as terror management theory. Over the past two decades, many studies have confirmed that inducing people to contemplate their eventual death sig-nificantly affects a wide range of behavioral and cognitive re-sponses, including aggression, defense of cultural worldviews, stereotyping, sexual attitudes, and prosocial behavior (se