Terror Management Theory and Autobiographical Memory: Does Mortality Salience Influence Narrative Content and Structure

Terror management theory posits that individuals respond positively to people and ideas that bolster their cultural worldviews and negatively to those that threaten their cultural anxiety buffers (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski & Lyon, 1989). Repeated studies have shown that people exposed to awareness of immanent death write different kinds and varying lengths of story narratives than people not exposed to death prompts prior to writing. The purpose of the present study was to address whether priming individuals with thoughts of their own mortality would influence the content (references to self, others and emotionality words) and structure (narrative length) of autobiographical memory narratives. Results indicate that priming individuals with thoughts of their own mortality did not have an overall effect on the measures indicated, although mortality salience did interact with others variables to produce an effect. It was observed that when primed with death those in the non-imagined self condition wrote narratives that contained more references to others. Results also indicated that females wrote narratives that were longer in length and contained more emotionality in comparison to males. These results support previous findings in the area of narrative length and emotion (Friedman & Pines, 1991, see Buckner & Fivush, 1998,2000, for reviews). With no clear evidence of the independent effects of mortality salience on autobiographical memory future research is needed to clarify the relationship on this topic.