1Effects of Mortality Salience on Musical Perception – The Complex made Simple

The authors inquired the impact of mortality salience on perceived complexity of music. In social psychology, terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) conceives fear of death as a motivational force driving humans towards an increased adherence to ingroup values, which are in turn described as the person´s cultural worldview. In contrast to this position, the authors suggest that imposed threat does not affect the ascription of cultural value but leads to a perceptual reduction of complex information to simple, clear cut positions. Hence complex music presented under threatening conditions should be perceived as simple and unambiguous. Participants in threatening versus comforting situations were exposed to either ambiguous or unambiguous musical stimuli of high versus low assigned cultural value. Though under threat, TMT predicts a preference for "cultural values", it wa