The painful awareness of death: Influence of thoughts of death on behavioural and cerebral activity associated with painful nociceptive stimuli

Terror Management Theory (TMT) attempts to explain how the awareness of mortality affects people. There has been a large volume of research investigating the changes of human behaviour triggered by awareness of mortality. However, much less is known about the underlying neural processes of these defensive behavioural changes. In this thesis, I will present two novel studies expanding on previous methodologies in order to investigate two types of potential moderators for the effects of death anxiety: Study 1 investigated the moderating roles of seven personality traits which were previously linked to the framework of Terror Management Theory. Study 2 explores the buffering effects of meditation techniques against death anxiety. We applied threatening somatosensory stimuli to investigate the effects of reminders of mortality on pain perception and on somatosensory brain responses. We also implemented linear mixed-effects modelling of the data. Mixed-effects models are better at tackling emblematic issues of electroencephalography (EEG) data, such as wide within-subject variability and unequal group sizes, than analyses of variance or t-tests. As such, we are presenting a more robust and appropriate method for analysing EEG and behavioural data. We showed significant predictive ability of anxiety and depression trait scores on the effectiveness of reminders of mortality. Anxiety and depression scores predicted the efficiency of reminders of mortality both on behaviour and brain responses. Furthermore, we showcase the buffering effect of meditation practice against death anxiety. Thus, our results lay out groundwork for a) potential development of new analysis methods for neural data, b) the importance of personality trait measurements for studies using mind-set manipulation and c) the potential of practice in relaxation techniques in buffering death anxiety.