Terror Management Theory Essay -- Psychology, Anxiety, self-esteem

Terror management theory (TMT) asserts that human beings have natural tendency for self-preservation if there is threat to one’s well–being (Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997). It notes that we are the cultural animals that pose self-awareness on the concept of past and future, as well as the understanding that one day we will die. We concern about our life and death but aware that it is unexpected by everything. The worse matter is that we become aware of our vulnerability and helplessness when facing death-related thoughts and ultimate demise (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1992). The inevitable death awareness or mortality salience provides a ground for experiencing the existential terror, which is the overwhelming concern of people’s mortality and existence. In order to avoid the continued existence of threats, people need faith in a relatively affirmative and plausive cultural worldview and meaning of life (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1995). Cultural worldview is a perceptual construction in the society which explaining the origins of life and the existence of afterlife. We have to invest a set of cultural worldviews by ourselves that are able to provide meaning, stability and order to our lives and to offer the promise of death transcendence (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004). On the other hand, we hold a belief that one is living up to the standards of value prescribed by that worldview and social norm shared by a group of people. This belief is derived by self-esteem of individual. We maintain the perception and confident that we are fulfilling the cultural prescriptions for value in the society and are thus eligible for some form of personal immortality (Landau & Greenberg, 2006). We Together with the assump... ... and death-thought accessibility which are typically evoked by mortality reminders (Greenberg et al., 1993). The research further stated that self-esteem and death awareness are high interdependent with each other and the self-esteem-anxiety-hypothesis. For TMT, A second line of support for the terror management function of self-esteem comes from tests of the mortality salience hypothesis which is another hypothesis derived from TMT. Similar to the anxiety-buffer hypothesis, it states that temporarily increasing the accessibility of death-related thought self-esteem provides protection from mortality concerns, and hence individuals will then intensify their efforts to bolster and defend self-esteem. In sum, convergent evidence supports the claim that self-esteem functions as a buffer against mortality concerns (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, & Maxfield, 2006).