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Mortality Salience
Mortality salience is the awareness by individuals that their death is inevitable. The term derives from terror management theory, which proposes that mortality salience causes existential anxiety that may be buffered by an individual's cultural worldview and/or a sense of self-esteem. Terror management theory Mortality salience engages the conflict that humans have to face both their instinct to avoid death completely, and their intellectual knowledge that avoiding death is ultimately futile. According to terror management theory, when human beings begin to contemplate their mortality and their vulnerability to death, feelings of terror emerge because of the simple fact that humans want to avoid their inevitable death. Mortality salience comes into effect, because humans contribute all of their actions to either avoiding death or distracting themselves from the contemplation of it. Thus, terror management theory asserts that almost all human activity is driven by the fear of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heideggerian Terminology
Martin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, produced a large body of work that intended a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that he found it necessary to introduce many neologisms, often connected to Idiom, idiomatic words and phrases in the German language. Two of his most basic neologisms, present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, are used to describe various attitudes toward things in the world. For Heidegger, such "attitudes" are prior to, i.e. more basic than, the various sciences of the individual items in the world. Science itself is an attitude, one that attempts a kind of neutral investigation. Other related terms are also explained below. Heidegger's overall analysis is quite involved, taking in a lot of the history of philosophy. See ''Being and Time'' for a description of his overall project, and to give some context to these technical terms. Terms ( grc, ἀλήθεια) Heidegger's idea of , or disclosure (), was a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Attitude Change
Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.Eagly, A., & Chaiken, S. (1995). Attitude strength, attitude structure and resistance to change. In R. Petty and J. Kosnik (Eds.), Attitude Strength. (pp. 413–432). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Bases There are three bases for attitude change: compliance, identif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motivational Theories
Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often held that different mental states compete with each other and that only the strongest state determines behavior. This means that we can be motivated to do something without actually doing it. The paradigmatic mental state providing motivation is desire. But various other states, such as beliefs about what one ought to do or intentions, may also provide motivation. Motivation is derived from the word 'motive', which denotes a person's needs, desires, wants, or urges. It is the process of motivating individuals to take action in order to achieve a goal. The psychological elements fueling people's behavior in the context of job goals might include a desire for money. Various competing theories have been proposed con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Suicidal Ideation
Suicidal ideation, or suicidal thoughts, means having thoughts, ideas, or ruminations about the possibility of ending one's own life.World Health Organization, ''ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics'', ver. 09/2020MB26.A Suicidal ideation/ref> It is not a diagnosis but is a symptom of some mental disorders and can also occur in response to adverse events without the presence of a mental disorder.Barry, Lisa C. Passive Suicidal Ideation in Older Adults: Implications for Suicide Prevention, ''American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry'' 27, no. 12 (December 2019): 1411 ("... growing evidence points toward a subgroup of individuals who endorse passive SI uicidal ideationin later life outside the context of clinical depression.") On suicide risk scales, the range of suicidal ideation varies from fleeting thoughts to detailed planning. Passive suicidal ideation is thinking about not wanting to live or imagining being dead. Active suicidal ideation involves preparation to comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions. History Although issues in social psychology have been discussed in philosophy for much of human history, the scientific discipline of social psychology formally began in the late 19th to early 20th century. 19th century In the 19th century, social psychology began to emerge from the larger field of psychology. At the time, many psychologists were concerned with developing concrete explanations for the different aspects of human nature. They attempted to discover concrete cause-and-effect relationships that explained social interactions. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memento Mori
''Memento mori'' (Latin for 'remember that you ave todie'Literally 'remember (that you have) to die' , Third Edition, June 2001.) is an artistic or symbolic acting as a reminder of the inevitability of . The concept has its roots in the philosophers of |
Existential Psychology
Existential psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy based on the model of human nature and experience developed by the existential tradition of European philosophy. It focuses on concepts that are universally applicable to human existence including death, freedom, responsibility, and the meaning of life. Instead of regarding human experiences such as anxiety, alienation, and depression as implying the presence of mental illness, existential psychotherapy sees these experiences as natural stages in a normal process of human development and maturation. In facilitating this process of development and maturation, existential psychotherapy involves a philosophical exploration of an individual's experiences stressing the individual's freedom and responsibility to facilitate a higher degree of meaning and well-being in their life. Background The philosophers who are especially pertinent to the development of existential psychotherapy are those whose works were directly aimed at mak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Death Anxiety
Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one's own death, and is also referred to as thanatophobia (fear of death). Death anxiety differs from necrophobia, which is the fear of others who are dead or dying. Psychotherapist Robert Langs proposed three different causes of death anxiety: predatory, predator, and existential. In addition to his research, many theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, and Ernest Becker have examined death anxiety and its impact on cognitive processing. Death anxiety has been found to affect people of differing demographic groups as well, such as men versus women, young versus old, etc. Additionally, there is anxiety caused by death-recent thought-content, which might be classified within a clinical setting by a psychiatrist as morbid and/or abnormal. This classification pre-necessitates a degree of anxiety which is persistent and interferes with everyday functioning. Lower ego integrity, more physical problems and more psycholog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Dissonance
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.Festinger, L. (1957). ''A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance''. California: Stanford University Press. In '' When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World'' ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birthday Effect
The birthday effect (sometimes called the birthday blues, especially when referring specifically to suicide) is a statistical phenomenon where an individual's likelihood of death appears to increase on or close to their birthday. The birthday effect has been seen in studies of general populations in England and Wales, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United States, as well as in smaller populations such as Major League Baseball players. Studies do not consistently show this effect; some studies find that men's and women's mortality rates diverge in the run-up to the birthday, while others find no significant gender effect. Suggested mechanisms for the effect include alcohol consumption, psychological stress relating to the birthday, increased suicide risk, terminally ill patients attempting to hold on until their birthday, an increased mortality salience, or a physiological cycle that causes the body to weaken annually. It has also been suggested that it may be a statistical arti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Awareness Of Dying
''Awareness of Dying'' is a 1965 book () by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss. In his 2007 article, sociologist Stefan Timmermans called the book "landmark". History and content When Strauss came to the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco, he looked for an interesting subject that would also get the attention of medical people. Visiting hospitals, he discovered that dying was a highly problematic issue. Strauss started field studies and six months later hired Glaser from Columbia University. Both researchers already had personal experience with the subject: Strauss had lost his mother and a friend in recent years, Glaser his father. Strauss and Glaser suspected early on that the expectation of death by both the dying and the relatives were a key to understanding the interactions between those people. Their choice of hospitals and stations allowed them to compare various kinds of expectations. On a premature infant station, mortality was high but the pat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
