Do unconscious brain parts protect the conscious mind?

Lexington, KY, USA. Philosophers and scientists have long been interested in how the mind processes the inevitability of death, both cognitively and emotionally. One would expect, for example, that reminders of our mortality — say the sudden death of a loved one — would throw us into a state of disabling fear of the unknown.

 

But that doesn't happen. If the prospect of death is so incomprehensible, why are we not trembling in a constant state of terror over this fact?

Psychologists have some ideas about how we cope with existential dread. One emerging idea — “terror management theory” — holds that the brain is hard-wired to keep us from being paralyzed by fear.

 

According to this theory the brain allows us to think about dying, even to change the way we live our lives, but not cower in the corner, paralyzed by fear. The automatic, unconscious part of our brain in effect protects the conscious mind.

But how does this work? Psychologists Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University ran three experiments to study existential dread in the laboratory. They prompted volunteers to think about what happens physically as they die and to imagine what it is like to be dead. It's the experimental equivalent of losing a loved one and ruminating about dying as a result.

Once the volunteers were preoccupied with thoughts of death and dying, they completed a series of word tests, which have been designed to tap into unconscious emotions. For example, volunteers might be asked to complete the word stem "jo_" to make a word. They could make a neutral word like job or jog, or they might instead opt for the emotional word joy.

 

Or, in a similar test, they might see the word puppy flashed on a screen, and they would instantaneously have to choose either beetle or parade as the best match.

 

Beetle is closer to puppy in meaning, but parade is closer to puppy in emotional content. The idea is that the results represent the unconscious mind at work. The experimental results, as reported in the journal Psychological Science, were intriguing. 

 

Volunteers preoccupied with thoughts of death were not at all morose if you tapped into their emotional brains. Indeed, the opposite: they were much more likely than control subjects to summon up positive emotional associations rather than neutral or negative ones.

 

What this suggests, the psychologists say, is that the brain is involuntarily searches out and activates pleasant, positive information from the memory banks in order to help the brain cope with an incomprehensible threat.

 

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From Terror to Joy: Automatic Tuning to Positive Affective Information Following Mortality Salience. C. Nathan DeWall, Roy F. Baumeister. Psychological Science 18 (11), 984–990. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02013.x (2007)

 

Abstract. Reminders of death tend to produce strong cognitive and behavioral responses, but little or no emotional response. In three experiments, mortality salience produced an automatic coping response that involved tuning to positive emotional information. Subjects showed increased accessibility of positive emotional information (Experiments 1 and 3) and gave more weight to positive emotion in their judgments of word similarity (Experiment 2) after contemplating death than after thinking about dental pain. This automatic coping response was found both after a delay (Experiments 1 and 2) and directly after the mortality-salience manipulation (Experiment 3), which suggests that the coping process begins immediately. Tuning to positive emotional information in response to mortality salience was unconscious and counterintuitive (Experiment 3). These findings shed light on the coping process that ensues immediately following mortality salience and help to explain why a delay is often necessary to produce effects in line with terror management theory.

 

 

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