Feelin' blue? Here, this'll cheer you right up.
Picture yourself laying on the cool grass... as it soaks up the arterial blood pouring out of a massive chest wound. Then picture the expression on your face: a rictus of disbelief, now going pale and slack as your head flops to the side, the light already fading from your eyes, a final dullness glazing over them. Good. Finally, imagine your recently buried body, swollen in your funeral clothes from the gases given off by decomposition, and then decades later, moldering and sloughing apart in its rotting box, a box which, with each passing day, marks an evermore pointless distinction between its contents and the damp dirt outside.
I'll bet that frown's turned upside down already! And so do the authors of a recent study in Psychological Science, who claim that contemplating oblivion activates our unconscious mental defense mechanisms -- in essence, taking us to our "happy place" without us even knowing it.
The researchers asked 432 undergraduates to imagine their own deaths and write short essays about it. They then measured the volunteers' "nonconscious" emotional affect using a word-association task. Compared with the control group (who were merely asked to imagine a visit to the dentist),
the students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group. [Lead author Nathan] DeWall thinks this mental coping response kicks in immediately when confronted with a serious psychological threat. In subsequent research, he has analyzed the content of the volunteers' death essays and found that they're sprinkled with positive words.
"When you ask people, 'Describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,'" says DeWall, "people will report fear and contempt, but also happiness that 'I'm going to see my grandmother' and joy that 'I'm going to be with God.'"
So, superstition helps too. But DeWall thinks this same coping mechanism also kicks in to offset other common psychological bugaboos, like "the fact that you're not going to get that promotion, or that your spouse is cheating on you, or that your kid is on drugs."
Yup. Feeling happier already.
[via Mind Hacks, via Time magazine]
Comments
Ted Alvarez
says:
"So, superstition helps too."
Ouch! Take that, religious fools!
November 9, 2007 11:46 AM
jane says:
Sounds like a load of rubbish to me. The death scene was disgusting.Give me the dentist any day
November 13, 2007 7:42 PM
Eddie N. says:
At last science knows some of the reasons behind religion. It may need decades more to unveil the positive effects of religion to human kind.
November 13, 2007 9:20 PM
Marina says:
Sounds to me like a disguting load of rubbish.
People always try to comfort their kids where death is concerned by saying positive things - whether they believe these or not. Maybe we've all learnt from our mothers to do the same.
Ask me to describe my death and I'll probably also try to make it sounder nicer than I actually expect it to be.
The one 'positive' thing thinking about one's death might bring around, is to put today's biggest crisis of whatever sorts into perspective.
November 14, 2007 9:24 AM
mari says:
GOD is always with you , science has tried to disprove that for ages but the more that they try the more they help believers. What about the NEAR DEATH EXAPERIENCES?
November 14, 2007 9:34 AM
Perry B says:
This study should help put "Psychological Science" at the top of the Oxymoron Of The Year list....
November 14, 2007 9:40 AM
Himadri says:
It seems that they did the experimetns with people mojority of whom believed in God (that is the normal sample of American population). They should first segregate people into two groups - God-believer and God-nonbelievers and see if the result correlates with that parameter. Without reading the paper, it seems to me that the analysis of the data was not done thoroughly and the effect is being attributed to the wrong factor. I feel that this will not work who do not believe in after life or God. Scientific process calls for more thorough investigation.
November 14, 2007 9:54 AM
James Johnson says:
The science does look a bit preliminary--word association is not the highest form of measurement.
But this is feasible as part of an explanation. From my perspective, religion is the opium (of choice) for most people. Others turn to Amway, global warming etc.
I think all of us have our opium--its potentially explainable within evolutionary biology. We seem to have a slight genetic bias toward optimism (WSJ Science article). Without some capacity for "adaptive delusion" there could be an awful lot more depression.
November 14, 2007 9:59 AM
Leonard says:
Sounds like another one of those studies that conclusively demonstrate that some people do and some people don't. I also think calling religion a superstition, as if it were totally obvious, is not the best way to demonstrate one's lack of bias.
November 14, 2007 7:10 PM
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