3.1 Meaning Maintenance Model

Question 1

What is the relation between death anxiety and mental illness?

Answer 1

Suggested that one thing is sitting at the basis of many of the individual’s narrative - the thing is their fear of death

Question 2

What is the relation between death and OCD symptoms?

Answer 2

People who check everything is locked before bed etc = Justify their routines with connection to death or something v bad happening if they do not feel these procedures

People who excessively wash = they are afraid of germs because it may lead them to die

Question 3

What did Menzies and Dar-Nimrod investigate?

Answer 3

Looking quantitatively at the relationship of self-reported fear of death and OCD symptoms

Wanted to see how the existential anxieties relate to both subjective and objective elements in OCD

Question 4

What did Menzies and Dar-Nimrod find?

Answer 4

Found that death and OCD symptoms correlates moderate to strong - rarely seen
Correlates significantly and strongly with all the elements of existential anxiety

Question 5

What are correlations considered and what is strong?

Answer 5

Correlations are considered effect size

.5 is considered strong effect - don’t see this often in psych

Question 6

Discuss the Ps and the conditions in the OCD and dental pain test (refer to as dental pain study)

Answer 6

1/2 of the Ps were washers (66) and 1/2 Ps were checkers (66)

1/2 of each sample were asked to contemplate about their own death compared to others thinking about non-fatal dental pain (just an aversive experience)

Question 7

What were Ps told would evaluate their performance in the dental pain study?

Answer 7

Evaluate their performance on a cognitive test - word search task
Want to take some physiological readings of your experience so used harmless antibacterial gel on their hands to connect electrodes
Connected a microphone to them to better record the word identification
All of this was a SHAM

Question 8

What were investigators really measuring in the dental pain study?

Answer 8

They wanted them to wash their hands - put the gel on this to get them to wash
Attach them to microphone to hear how long they spend washing their hands

Question 9

What did the dental pain study find?

Answer 9

Individuals who were non-washers did not show an increase in washing behaviour when in MS condition

Washer Ps showed a huge effect in MS condition compared to aversive condition - used more soap and took longer to wash off the antibacterial gel

Question 10

What does the experimental evidence of the dental pain study show thoughts about death can cause?

Answer 10

Psychopathological symptoms

Question 11

What is central to existential psychology?

Answer 11

MEANING - when you stop thinking of yourself as someone who lives forever, meaning is lost

Question 12

What can meaning be defined as?

Answer 12

Expecting relationships

“mental representations of expected relations that organises their perceptions of the world”

Question 13

Discuss human beings and meaning

Answer 13

We drive to find meaning in things, even when there isn’t any

Question 14

Desrcibe Bruner’s experiment regarding meaning

Answer 14

Put cards in front of Ps and had them mention what the number is
Ps became more and more stressed - why?

Ps who can’t identify what is wrong with the card may feel some unease and start to get stressed
It is a red spade - this does not exist

Question 15

Why does Bruner’s study induce stress in Ps?

Answer 15

We see something that is violated but until we recognise what is being violated we are uncomfortable

The more exposures, the more unease and can lead to high stress
There is a major reaction to the visual anomaly

Question 16

What are the 5 A’s of the Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM)?

Answer 16

Assimilation 
Accommodation 
Affirmation 
Assembly 
Abstraction

Question 17

When do the 5 A’s of the MMM occur?

Answer 17

When our expectations of relations are violated

Question 18

Discuss assimilation

Answer 18

“The child dies because the mother is bad” - just world

Question 19

Discuss accommodation

Answer 19

Changing schema to accommodate for the new info
Happens a lot as children when learning new things
“sometimes bad things happen to good people”

Question 20

Discuss affirmation

Answer 20

The core of meaning maintenance
Fluid compensation
Defend an alternative framework

e.g. saying the child died because God is great and he liked them best

Question 21

Discuss assembly

Answer 21

Constructing an overarching new way of looking at things

A more powerful moral theory to replace a more primitive sense of right and wrong

Question 22

Discuss abstraction

Answer 22

Reaffirming alternative framework

Question 23

What did Proulx et al get Ps to do in their study and why?

Answer 23

Describe yourself as shy and outgoing - argue that you have 2 diff selves inhabiting the same body

Violate the fiction of our self unity
We are very good at keeping our own personal history where we are the same self throughout - when we violate this, things go wrong

Control condition: given Kafka’s narrative

Question 24

What was found when P’s given test about finding a single noise in Proulx et al’s study?

Answer 24

People identify more novel strings as similar to the one they had as a prime

Identify more and are more accurate at identifying them in finding signal in noise when things like violation of self-unity are experienced

Question 25

What has research suggested regarding moral circuitry of social and physical pain?

Answer 25

They go through the same nervous route - the dACC cortex is experienced in both

Question 26

How can you reduce the experience of social pain?

Answer 26

Use the pill Acetaminophen

Question 27

Discuss what DeWall et al’s study looked at

Answer 27

Wanted to see whether this pill would help with existential pain?
Played the weird rabbit clip v a clip of Donald Duck
Gave some Ps the pill
Wanted to see the experience of rabbit clip was pacified by the pill

Question 28

What did DeWall et al find?

Answer 28

If the Ps receive the pill and also threatened they did not show the increase in punishment for moral transgressors
Placebo Ps didn’t show this
Argument that this pill can help existential pain