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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> In their latest experiments, DeWall and Baumeister first primed more than 100 healthy young adult volunteers to think about death as a reality. They asked them to imagine the process of their own death, as well as what it might be like to be dead.
Another group of young adults was asked to think about an unpleasant event -- a trip to the dentist's office -- but not death.
Immediately after the priming exercise, the researchers had all of the participants undergo standard word tests that tapped into unconscious emotional states. In one test, participants were give a word stem -- "jo-" for example and asked to complete it to form a word ( i.e., "job", "jog", "joy").
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According to the researchers, individuals primed to think about death were much more likely than the other participants to choose the word "joy," compared to more neutral or negative words.
In another word test, the participants were offered a word and asked to pair it with one of two other words. One of the words was similar to the target word in its meaning, while the other word was more emotionally similar. For example, "puppy" might be paired with either "beetle" (another many-legged animal), or "parade" (not an animal, but fun, enjoyable, as puppies are).
Again, people primed to think about death were much more likely to choose "parade" over "beetle" compared to the other participants. This suggests they were unconsciously preferring the positive emotion embedded in that choice, the researchers said.
"People really don't know that they do this," DeWall said. "It's actually very counterintuitive. This picks up on the idea that when people are confronted with their own mortality, these sorts of concepts -- positive emotion words -- become readily accessible to them."
Another expert agreed that humans may be hardwired to "go to their happy place" when thoughts of death intrude.
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