Beauty versus Death: Mortality Salience and Body Self-Image Focus

The article describes five studies concerning the relationship between fear of death and focus on body self-image. The results of studies 2 and 3 showed that participants placed in the mortality salience condition evaluated their body higher compared to participants in control condition. This effect - contrary to expectations - did not appear in study 4. Moreover, the results showed that participants in the mortality salience group were more interested in magazines on health and body care (study 3) and declared higher willingness to introduce changes to their bodies (plastic surgery - study 4) than participants in control conditions. The study 1 showed that participants placed in the mortality salience group did not avoid self-confrontation compared to control group. Finally, the study 5 examined if fear of death would be higher among those participants who compared themselves with others. The results showed that this effect appeared only among those who drew intentional upward comparisons, but did not appear among those who drewautomatic comparisons (both upward and downward) and those who made intentional downwardcomparisons.The results highlight limits of the explanatory value of the Terror Management Theory. peerReviewed publishedVersion