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Defending a Coherent Autobiography: When Past Events Appear Incoherent, Mortality Salience Prompts Compensatory Bolstering of the Past's Significance and the Future's OrderlinessUniversity of Kansas, mjlandau{at}ku.edu
University of Arizona
University of Kansas Drawing on terror management theory, we propose that maintaining a coherent autobiography protects the individual from mortality concerns by imbuing experience over time with significance and order. Two studies test whether mortality salience combined with a threat to autobiographical coherence (induced by an alphabetical organization of past events) prompts compensatory bolstering of the significance and orderliness of temporal experience. In Study 1, whereas exclusion-primed participants led to organize past events alphabetically perceived their past as less significant, mortality salient participants showed a compensatory boost in perceptions of their past's significance. In Study 2, mortality salience and an alphabetic event organization led participants high in personal need for structure to parse their future into clearly defined temporal intervals. This research is the first to experimentally assess the role of existential concerns in people's motivation to defend the significance and structure of their temporal experience against threats to autobiographical coherence.
Key Words: autobiographical coherence • self-narrative • terror management theory • personal need for structure • time
This version was published on August
1, 2009 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 8,
1012-1020 (2009) |
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