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ow nloaded from 2 Recent research showed that perception of death-related vs. death-unrelated linguistic cues produced increased frontoparietal activity but decreased insular activity. The current study investigated (1) whether the increased frontoparietal and decreased insular activities are respectively associated with transient trial-specific processes of death-related linguistic cues and sustained death-related thought during death-relevance judgments on linguistic cues and (2) whether the neural activity underlying death-related thought can predict individuals ' dispositional death anxiety. Participants were presented with death-related/unrelated words, life-related/unrelated words, and negative-valence/neutral words in separate sessions. Participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing death-relevance, life-relevance, and valence judgments on the words, respectively