Mortality salience reduces tactile attention among people with low body esteem

Death awareness leads to aversion from bodily processes such as breastfeeding and sex, especially among low body esteem individuals. Using a modality bias task, we examined whether primes of death reduced attention to bodily sensations. We subliminally primed 72 undergraduates with either the word death or failed and assessed their attention to tactile and visual stimuli as a function of their body esteem. Results indicated that death primes significantly reduced attention to tactile stimuli relative to visual stimuli in low body esteem individuals. Dissociation from the body, therefore, may be an unconscious terror management strategy utilized by people with low body esteem.