Terror management theorists have proposed explanations of why death anxiety has a special status beyond other anxieties and furthermore argue that awareness of death elicits a defense mechanism that is qualitatively different from other sorts of threat-defense mechanisms. Our review suggests that the biological mechanisms through which thoughts of mortality motivate defensive behavior are not unique. rather, we propose that an evolutionarily primitive, biologically based anxiety system underlies mortality salience (MS) effects. Death anxiety may well be a mainspring of human activity, yet we suggest that a fundamental set of biological responses to uncertainty-and the processes associated with them-lie at the root of MS defenses. Our proposed motivational account of mortality salience provides a biologically informed, mechanistic elucidation of threat-compensation processes that may be applied to a wide range of social psychological phenomena.
The negative valence model of political orientation proposed by Hibbing et al. is comprehensive and thought-provoking. We agree that there is compelling research linking threat to conservative political beliefs. However, we propose that further research is needed before it can be concluded that negative valence, rather than arousal more generally, underlies the psychological motivations to endorse conservative political belief.
It is widely held that negative emotions such as threat, anxiety, and disgust represent the core psychological factors that enhance conservative political beliefs. We put forward an alternative hypothesis: that conservatism is fundamentally motivated by arousal, and that, in this context, the effect of negative emotion is due to engaging intensely arousing states. Here we show that study participants agreed more with right but not left-wing political speeches after being exposed to positive as well as negative emotion-inducing film-clips. No such effect emerged for neutral-content videos. A follow-up study replicated and extended this effect. These results are consistent with the idea that emotional arousal, in general, and not negative valence, specifically, may underlie political conservatism.
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