EXPANDING UNIVERSE: Why Thoughts of Death May Inspire Joy

by Betsy Robinson

Philosophers and scientists have long been interested in how the mind processes the inevitability of death. One would expect that reminders of our mortality — say, the sudden death of a loved one — would bring on a disabling fear of the unknown. But that doesn’t typically happen.

Why? According to “terror management theory,” the automatic, unconscious part of the brain protects the conscious mind from being paralyzed by fear. When we think about dying, we may change the way we live our lives, but we won’t cower in the corner.

To test this theory, psychologists Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University ran three experiments to study existential dread in the laboratory. Volunteers were asked to think about what happens physically as they die and to imagine what it’s like to be dead. Once they were immersed in such morbid thoughts, they completed a series of word tests. For example, volunteers might be asked to complete a word beginning “jo_.” They could make a neutral word like “job” or “jog,” or they might opt for the emotional word “joy.” Or, in a similar test, they might see the word “puppy” flashed on a screen, and they would instantaneously have to choose either “beetle” or “parade” as the best match. Beetle is closer to puppy in meaning, but parade is closer to puppy in emotional content. The word choices represented the unconscious mind at work.

The results of the test, reported in Psychological Science (November 2007), were that volunteers who were preoccupied with thoughts of death were not at all morose if you tapped into their emotional brains. In fact, they were much more likely than control subjects to summon up positive emotional associations rather than neutral or negative ones. Psychologists believe this suggests that the brain is involuntarily searching out and activating pleasant, positive information from the memory banks to help the brain cope with an incomprehensible threat.