Death Related Thoughts Accessibility Measure Task Pollution Research Results Possibilities

Death-Thought Accessibility, as an important concept of terror Management Theory, onone hand，linked the death anxiety and human behavior, explained how the former eventuallyaffects the latter; on the other hand, made the researchers realize that Mortality Saliencemanipulation is just one of the way to evoke the death anxiety and many occurrences orcircumstances in daily life would work exactly the same way so we can make the prime variousto enrich research scope and paradigms. Therefore it was introduced into many researches.But alike the motrality salience manipulation, the measuring of DTA can also make thesubjects exposed to death information, which means that the measuring might be seen as theprime of death anxiety as well. Then is it possible that the measuring would affect the findingsfollow-up therefore leads to wrong conclusion? The present study explores the question byusing two kind of DTA measuring theoretically and practically.The study can be separated into two parts based on the measurement of DTA. The firstpart of the study contains one experiment, experiment1explores whether the result varieswhen measuring DTA with reaction time task. The second part contains two experiments andexplores whether the result varies when measuring DTA with word fragment task. Experiment2altered the conventional DTA measurement to an ideal one to see if it works as death anxietyprime. Experiment3used the conventional procedure to see how the measuring works inreality.The results of experiment1manifest that measuring DTA by with spontaneous taskd’oesnt affect the findings. The results of experiment2show that the findings would beaffected when subjects receiving enough amount death information while measuring DTA, andthe defensive behavior thus inhibited. The results of experiment3indicate that though themeasuring could work as prime, the findings were not affected in regular study due toinadequate death information exposed.