Enjoying life in the face of death: East–West differences in responses to mortality salience.

Abstract

Five experiments explored the hypothesis that thinking about one's own death activates thoughts about enjoying one's life as moderated by culture. Given that Eastern cultures, relative to Western ones, are more holistic and endorse notions of "yin and yang" (e.g., where "good" and "bad" coexist in all things), we hypothesized that East Asians would be more likely than European Americans to think about life and strive more to enjoy life when mortality salience (MS) is evoked. As predicted, MS led East Asians, but not European Americans, to (a) activate more life-related thoughts (Study 1); (b) express greater interest in enjoyable daily life activities (Study 2); and (c) report enjoying daily life activities more (Study 3). Cultural differences in holism mediated the tendency to enjoy life in the face of death (Study 4), and experimental induction of holism caused greater life enjoyment in response to MS (Study 5). Implications for terror management theory and culture are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

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