Death Essay -- Psychology, Anxiety

Death is an inescapable event in human life. Human beings, to a certain extent, are afraid of the unpredictable and inevitable death issues and deadly threats. Reason behind the anxiety is due to the difficulty to find a definitive answer of a question on life and death (Becker, 1973). We aware their ultimate fate of nonexistence and deaths often occurs uncontrollably. In order to explain the death anxiety, terror management theory (TMT) was developed to help to answer the human’s psychological reaction on the existential terror of mortality issue (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Pyszczynski, Greenberg & Solomon, 1999). According to TMT, self-esteem is a defensive motivation in tackling the everyday life threats. It is a subjective concept that individual is being a valuable part in the world. Human animals obtain self-esteem mainly from their individual belief on cultural worldview – symbolic perception on the society shared by groups of people (Greenberg & Solomon, 1999). Individuals believed that their own set of cultural worldview is the only true value in the society. They feel that they are the valuable units engaging in the culture worldview and hence the perceptual construction maintains self-esteem of one self as well as providing defensive function to the death anxiety. Since self-esteem is derived from a strong perception on conceptual belief, it is able to serve as a psychological buffer that protects people against the awareness and negative feelings towards death (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1995). It is strong enough to shield people’s anxiety from death reminder s (i.e. mortality salience). When there is mortality salience, people enhance their self-esteem as a defensive reaction against the death... ...l to restore the emotion stability (Taubman et al., 2002). Secure attachment behaviour of relationship partners served as distress-regulation function to deal with anxieties encounter in the environment. It is asserted that the role of self-esteem in TMT and the role of secure attachment on proximity maintenance share the function of minimizing anxiety. The mechanism of distress regulation on securely attached behavior is able to generalize the fear of death (Mikulincer, Florian, & Tolmacz, 1990). Similar to the notion suggested by TMT, individuals required higher self-esteem to defend against death anxiety. Also, people with higher self-esteem elicit less death anxiety than the one with lower self-esteem since the positive self-evaluation provides an emotional buffer to minimize the anxiety. Secure attachment behaviour is also the buffer to negative emotions.