Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Existential Anxiety Can Motivate Escape from Self-Awareness

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/photoshopped/tree-of-death-photomanipulation.jpg

Or, in other words, thinking about death makes us anxious. This book chapter from Pelin Kesebir and Tom Pyszczynski (both from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs) looks at the awareness of death as a motivational factor.

In my psychoanalytic study group last week, we talked briefly about how the awareness of death can be a shock to people when it hits - because they have been motivated by anxiety to avoid that awareness. For many people this comes in mid-life or so, when their own parents die.

I grew up with death, however, animals we raised and butchered for food, my father when I was 13, various people I knew in middle school and high school, then some friends after college, and most recently, my "surrogate" father last spring. Add to that the fact that I was a little goth from time to time as a teenager, sitting in cemeteries high on acid - death really does not phase me.

Maybe there was some benefit to my growing up.

Pelin Kesebir
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Tom Pyszczynski
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MOTIVATION, R. Ryan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Motivation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011


Abstract:
The capacity for self-reflection, which plays an important role in human self-regulation, also leads people to become aware of the limitations of their existence. Awareness of the conflict between one’s desires (e.g., to live) and the limitations of existence (e.g., the inevitability of death) creates the potential for existential anxiety. In this chapter, we review how this anxiety affects human motivation and behavior in a variety of life domains. Terror management theory and research suggests that transcending death and protecting oneself against existential anxiety are potent needs. This protection is provided by an anxiety buffering system, which imbues people with a sense of meaning and value that function to shield them against these concerns. We review evidence of how the buffering system protects against existential anxiety in four dimensions of existence - the physical, personal, social, and spiritual domains. Because self-awareness is a prerequisite for existential anxiety, escaping self-awareness can also be an effective a way to obviate the problem of existence. After elaborating on how existential anxiety can motivate escape from self-awareness, we conclude the chapter with a discussion of remaining issues and directions for future research and theory development.
Here are the first two paragraphs of the article, essentially an introduction to the chapter (by the way, there is evidence that both elephants and dolphins - and maybe ravens/crows - understand, mourn, and remember deaths, and likely reflect on their own - so human are not the only animal with this affliction):
Unlike any other animal, we humans live our lives starkly aware that, despite our most fervent desires, death will sooner or later come to us. This knowledge, combined with other uniquely human sophisticated mental abilities, inevitably leads people to ask questions about the meaning, value, and purpose of existence. Although writers and philosophers throughout the ages have pointed to the vital impact of existential concerns on the human psyche, systematic empirical investigation of how existential concerns affect human motivation began only relatively recently. The purpose of terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) is to explain the role that awareness of the inevitability of death plays in diverse aspects of human life. In this chapter, we review what terror management theory and research has revealed about existential anxiety and its effects on human behavior and experience. The main tenet of TMT is that the desire to transcend the fragility of human existence by construing oneself as a valuable contributor to a meaningful universe lies at the root of a diverse array of otherwise distinct human motives.

The research we will review in this chapter focuses on a uniquely human source of motivation. Although other animals react with fear to clear and present dangers that threaten their existence, only humans have the self-awareness that leads them to realize that death is inevitable. Like other evolutionary advances, this awareness led to changes in the way motivational systems operated by building on previous evolved adaptations. Thus, existential motivation operates on other more basic motive systems—co-opting them to meet new needs and changing the way other needs other needs are pursued. We start by considering how the emergence of self-awareness changed the human condition.

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