Effect of induced fear of death on belief in afterlife.

Abstract

Sixty subjects scoring high or low on a belief-in-afterlife (BA) scale were exposed to a death threat, shock threat, or control treatment. Only the high believers exposed to death threat showed an increase in score on an alternate BA scale; the scores of the other five groups remained unchanged. The results could not be attributed to anxiety alone, since self-ratings on anxiety did not differ between the death threat and the shock threat groups, although they were higher for these groups than for the control groups. The results were interpreted as confirming the hypothesis that strong BA may serve to deal with death anxiety.

Belief in afterlife as a moderator of fear of death?

“…However, self-ratings for these groups were significantly higher than those for the control groups. Osarchuk and Tatz (1973), taking these results as confirmation of their hypothesis, give the following explanation: 'The mechanism envisaged is one in which, when fear of death has been aroused, if the individual thinks in positive terms about a life after death, he experiences cognitions and affects incompatible with those comprising fear of death. Thus, accepting BA results in a reinforcing fear reduction, so that the individual is likely in the future to use BA to produce the same effect.…”

On the belief in God: Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control

“…The groundwork for this hypothesis has been laid across several theoretical perspectives. At a broad level, we join a number of other researchers in suggesting that religious beliefs emerge from ordinary cognitive processes (Boyer, 2003;Guthrie, 1993) and could be motivated by the desire to down-regulate threat (McGregor, 2006;McGregor, Gailliot, Vasquez, & Nash, 2007;McGregor & Haji, 2007) and avoid various negative psychological states, such as stress (e.g., McIntosh, 1995;Pargament, 1997;Park, 2005), social alienation (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008), or existential dilemmas (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004;Jonas & Fischer, 2006;Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006;Osarchuk & Tatz, 1973). Moreover, recent research on system justification theory (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004;Kay et al, 2007) has explicitly noted the palliative function of endorsing broad ideological belief systems under times of threat.…”

Death anxiety: “State” or “trait”?

“…With respect to hypothesized increases in death anxiety or religious content in control groups after tape-slide presentation, it should be noted that the present study is not a strict replication of Boyar (1964) or of Osarchuk and Tatz (1973).…”