Religious fundamentalism and responses to mortality salience: A quantitative text analysis

Abstract

Investigating an issue of critical importance for the psychology of religion and for terror management theory, this study examines the relationship between religious fundamentalism and beliefs about death as articulated during a mortality salience (MS) manipulation. Participants wrote about the emotions and events surrounding their own death (MS), or a control topic, and linguistic content in the essays was related to levels of self-reported fundamentalism of the essay authors. Higher levels of fundamentalism were associated with responses to MS that were less cognitively complex, contained more positive emotion, and were more future and socially oriented. There was virtually no relationship between fundamentalism and linguistic properties of writings about a control topic. The discussion centers on the influence of fundamentalist belief systems on attitudes toward death and suggests how the current results might aid future study of religious belief and of terror management.