中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

The literature has indicated that self-affirmation attenuates defensive responding (e.g., derogation of an offensive essay’s author, accessibility of death-related cognitions) to mortality threat. The current eyetracking study built on that literature to examine whether self-affirmation influences attentional processing of mortality threat. Participants (N = 51), after being randomly assigned to the self-affirmation or control condition, completed a free-viewing task that consisted of death-related (mortality threat) and non-deathrelated (control) images while their eye movements were being recorded. The results indicated that selfaffirmation reduced attentional vigilance toward mortality threat both at the early stage and the whole stage of the free-viewing task. Reduced vigilance to mortality threat may be a precursor to attenuated defensive responding to it.