Denial of Death? Death-Related Words are Suppressed in a Think/No-Think Paradigm

According to terror management theory, humans automatically suppress the thought of death when reminded of their mortality (mortality salience; MS), leading to a hyper- accessibility of death-related thoughts under MS. Here, we tested the claim of automatic death-thought-suppression using a think/no-think paradigm. Participants were reminded of death or a painful tooth treatment (control) before learning word associations between cue words and neutral, negative, or death-related target words. First analyses indicate that in the study phase, participants under MS performed worse in acquiring the target words. In the test phase, these general performance differences disappeared. However, death-related words were generally remembered worse than negative words, but better with multiple attempts of suppression under MS. This effect stands in line with the assumption of suppressed thoughts becoming hyper-accessible. Participants in the control group did remember less death-related words than participants under MS. This effect hints at an automatic thought suppression of death-thoughts.