Does the thought of death contribute to the memory benefit of encoding with a survival scenario?

Abstract

Four studies tested whether the thought of death contributes to the survival processing advantage found in memory tests (i.e., the survival effect). In the first study, we replicated the “Dying To Remember” (DTR) effect identified by Burns and colleagues whereby activation of death thoughts led to better retention than an aversive control situation. In Study 2, we compared an ancestral survival scenario, a modern survival scenario and a “life-after-death” scenario. The modern survival scenario and the dying scenario led to higher levels of recall than the ancestral scenario. In Study 3, we used a more salient death-thought scenario in which people imagine themselves on death row. Results showed that the “death-row” scenario yielded a level of recall similar to that of the ancestral survival condition. We also collected ratings of death-related thoughts (Studies 3 and 4) and of survival-related and planning thoughts (Study 4). The ratings indicated that death-related thoughts were induced more by the dying scenarios than by the survival scenarios, whereas the reverse was observed for both survival-related and planning thoughts. The findings are discussed in the light of two contrasting views of the influence of mortality salience in the survival effect.

Keywords:

• Adaptive memory
• Death
• Mortality salience
• Survival effect
• Evolutionary psychology

The authors wish to thank Daniel Burns, Angela Gutchess, Stanley Klein, James Nairne, and two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments. We also thank Mélanie Provost and Sophie Duhamel very much for their help in the collection of the data.

This work was supported by a grant from the Conseil Régional de Bourgogne to the first author and by a grant from the Institut Universitaire de France to the second and third authors.

The authors wish to thank Daniel Burns, Angela Gutchess, Stanley Klein, James Nairne, and two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments. We also thank Mélanie Provost and Sophie Duhamel very much for their help in the collection of the data.

This work was supported by a grant from the Conseil Régional de Bourgogne to the first author and by a grant from the Institut Universitaire de France to the second and third authors.

Notes

¹ To further investigate the finding that thoughts of death did not impact correct recall, we performed median-split analyses on the ratings of death-related thoughts. Thus, for each encoding condition, we created two groups: a low and a high death-related thought group. The analyses did not reveal that the recall rates varied reliably as a function of high- versus low-death ratings.

² We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.