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Abstract
To examine whether the soothing effect of food may be related to terror management processes, 149 Israeli college students were assigned to a mortality salience, fail salience, or neutral condition. Then, they were exposed to 1 of 3 tasting conditions ranging from pleasant to unpleasant or to a fourth condition with no tasting. Following this procedure all participants were asked to judge the severity of 10 social transgressions and recommend punishments. The results showed that in the no-tasting condition mortality salience led to more severe judgments of social transgressions than in the 2 control conditions. However, this effect was attenuated in the tasting conditions, especially in the positive taste condition wherein death primes led to less severe judgments of transgressions than in the other conditions. The discussion examines the utility of a terror management perspective in understanding the relation between stress and overeating.
