ABSTRACT
Upon becoming aware that one’s health is in danger, people face a ‘selfcontrol dilemma’ (Trope and Pomerantz, 1998) - a trade-off between engaging in long-term management of the threat at the cost of immediate emotional distress. How do people accomplish the dual tasks of managing sometimes extreme distress while simultaneously taking action to reduce the objective danger? The purpose of this chapter is to examine the role of defensive denial in how people respond to health threats. We focus specifically on understanding whether and how defensive processes work to regulate negative affect, and whether this comes at the cost of reduced motivation to behaviorally manage the threat. We will suggest that subtle defensive processes often enhance the effectiveness of a dynamic system designed to manage health threats because they efficiently keep negative emotional arousal at adaptive levels so that health protective actions can be identified, implemented, and maintained.
