Looking away from death: Defensive attention as a form of terror management

Threat and Defense

“…Similarly, control threats heighten the denial of randomness and chance in participants' lives (Kay et al, 2008; Study 2), and health threats promote avoidance of medical risk information (Sweeny, Melnyk, Miller, & Shepperd, 2010). Evidence that such proximal reactions are avoidance-motivated comes from studies showing that relationship threats decrease response latencies when identifying avoidancerelated compared to approach-related words (Cavallo, Fitzsimons, & Holmes, 2010), and that subliminal death primes reduce gaze duration toward pictures of physical injury but not neutral pictures (Hirschberger, Ein-Dor, Caspi, Arzouan, & Zivotfsky, 2010). A related proximal defense strategy is the tendency to move death into the distant future.…”

On the Other Side of the Mirror: Priming in Cognitive and Social Psychology

“…Although early studies had already suggested that subtle primes could affect social judgment unbeknownst to the subject (e.g., Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982;Devine, 1989;Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977;Srull & Wyer, 1979), the seminal studies of Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) in the 1990s were the first to show that the automatic effects of primes extended to overt actions. The wealth of studies conducted since then appears to confirm the power of automatic behavioral priming.…”

Using international emotional picture sets in countries suffering from violence

“…Although some studies using the picture set have validated the pictures in their specific population (Bermpohl et al, 2006;Kwon, Scheibe, Samanez-Larkin, Tsai, & Carstensen, 2009;Müller et al, 2008), other studies-including studies done in a population similar to ours (Hirschberger, Ein-Dor, Caspi, Arzouan, & Zivotofsky, 2010)-relied on the norms based on the American population (Kemp, Gray, Eide, Silberstein, & Nathan, 2002). The current findings suggest that relying on the norms collected in a different population may be inaccurate, especially when the work is performed in a population exposed to continuous stressful situations.…”