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Updated: Sep 10, 2025

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex to Experimentally Reduce Ideological Threat Responses

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Measuring American adults' perceptions about human existence: A cross-sectional study.

Megan Rose Carr LaPorte^1,2, Linda Emanuel^3,4, Sheldon Solomon⁵

¹Department of Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Palliative & Supportive Care

|August 22, 2025

Summary

Existential maturation, a process prompted by death awareness, lacks direct measures. This study explored mortality salience effects on death thoughts and related psychological constructs.

Keywords:

Existential maturation adult attachment explicit death anxiety implicit death anxiety terror management theory

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Existential Psychology
Mortality Salience Research

Background:

Awareness of death influences psychological well-being, prompting distress and a maturation process termed existential maturation.
Currently, quantitative measures for existential maturation are lacking, hindering the study of interventions for existential distress.
This research investigates the impact of mortality salience on implicit death thoughts and related psychological constructs.

Purpose of the Study:

To examine the effect of a mortality salience stimulus on implicit death thoughts over time.
To explore associations among existing measures of constructs relevant to existential maturation.
To identify potential indicators for future development of existential maturation measures.

Main Methods:

A cross-sectional survey was administered to 1,000 US adults representative of urban and rural populations.
The survey included a mortality salience stimulus (Death Anxiety Beliefs and Behaviors Scale) and measures of death-thought accessibility (DTA), existential isolation, distress, flourishing, transcendence, and attachment.
Data were analyzed using correlational and multivariate analyses.

Main Results:

The mortality salience stimulus did not yield expected results on death-thought accessibility (DTA).
Significant positive correlations were found between existential isolation and distress, and between flourishing and transcendence.
Attachment styles showed notable associations: avoidant attachment related to lower isolation/distress, while death anxiety linked to anxious/ambivalent attachment.

Conclusions:

The study highlights significant interrelations between attachment styles and indicators of existential maturation.
Limitations include a potentially ineffective death reminder or online format affecting DTA results.
Further research is needed to develop implicit measures for assessing nonconscious components of existential maturation.