Citation

Chatard A, Selimbegović L, Pyszczynski T, Jaafari N. J. Soc. Clin. Psychol. 2017; 36(1): 1-21.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Guilford Publications)

DOI

10.1521/jscp.2017.36.1.1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Building on escape and terror management theories, we reasoned that after failure the desire to escape the self (as reflected in suicide-thought accessibility) would dominate among dysphoric students, while fear of death (as indexed by death-thought accessibility) would dominate among nondysphoric students. The present study (N = 82 college students) examined this hypothesis. As expected, dysphoric students showed greater accessibility of suicide-related thoughts than of death-related thoughts after failure to attain a high standard of intelligence. In contrast, in the same situation, nondysphoric students showed greater accessibility of death- related thoughts than of suicide-related thoughts. The results suggest that dysphoric individuals are particularly vulnerable to suicide-related thoughts after failure, indicating that desire to escape may surpass death anxiety in this context. These results offer a fine-grained analysis of the impact of failure on implicit thoughts of death and suicide and help to reconcile divergent findings in the literature. Practical implications are discussed.

Language: en