Mortality salience impairs self-referential processing: Neurophysiological and behavioral evidence

Although recent research has suggested that reminders of mortality may increase behaviors and cognitions associated with escaping the self, this notion has not been directly tested. The current work provides evidence that mortality salience (MS) decreases the brain activity in response to the encoding of self-referential memory (Experiment 1) and impairs subsequent retrieval of self-referential memory (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 (N = 39) used event-related potentials to examine participants’ brain response while they performed trait judgments about the self and a celebrity, after they were primed with either MS or death-irrelevant negative affect (NA). Relative to NA, MS priming significantly attenuated an early frontal positivity at 180–300 ms in response to self- vs. celebrity-referential encoding. In Experiment 2 (N = 177), MS- and NA-primed participants performed the above trait judgment tasks and then completed a recognition test for the previously presented trait adjectives. Relative to NA priming, MS priming impaired recognition of trait adjectives that were associated with the self but not the celebrity. Overall, our findings suggest impaired self-referential processing, or ‘escaping’ the self, as a coping strategy for mortality concerns.