It seems intuitive that reminding people they will die impacts their emotions. But do men and women react differently to thinking about their inevitable demise?
For more than 15 years, experimental social psychologists have explored how people respond to reminders that they will die. Typically, this involves having them write a short response to two items related to their own death (e.g., "Please jot down, as specifically as you can, the thoughts and feelings that your own death arouses in you".) Following this, people typically are asked to report on a 1-5 scale how much they are feeling several emotions.
Oddly (to me at least) these researchers have typically found that reminders of death (compared to other aversive topics) do not elicit mood or emotional changes using these scales. Study after study has found that men and women do not report feeling any differently after being reminded of death. The standard thinking here is that people aren't that emotionally impacted by these subtle reminders of death, even though they frequently elicit a wide range of other effects (e.g, increased self-enhancement, need for coherance, and worldview defense).
Robert Kastenbaum, author of The Psychology of Death, and professor emeritus at Arizona State University, and I wondered, however, if traces of emotion could be found in people's written responses to the questions about death.
Our results found that 68% of women wrote in their responses that thinking about death made them anxious, compared to only 36% of men (e.g., used words like anxious, fearful). In contrast, 53% of women reported that it would make them sad, compared to 45% for men.
We also found that only 11% of women reported being unaffected (e.g., used words like not afraid, apathetic. detached), compared to 22% of men.Interestingly, 44% of women wrote positive emotions (fun, proud, satisfied, joyful), whereas only 30% of men did.
Several things stood out in these findings. First, it seems as though death thoughts do elicit emotional reactions, even if past methods of measuring mood have (usually) failed to detect this. Secondly, death thoughts are not only making people afraid but also quite sad. Thirdly, many people are actually quite happy when they think about death.
And lastly, women reported more positive and negative mood than men, which is consistent with current research suggesting that positive and negative emotions often co-exist (as opposed to happiness being the absence of sadness, like many had believed), and with research that women report more emotions than men.
Typically, death is hidden. People (typically) prefer not to talk or think about it, at least not when they aren't grieving or facing immediate death awareness (like a terminal illness). However, this can only be so effective, as reminders of death are everywhere (the news, driving by graveyards).
And as such, this work shows that these reminders of death could have a pretty profound emotional effect on people in their daily lives. Yet, (falsely I think) few people actually consider death concerns to be of much concern to most people, most of the time.
