ABSTRACT
A core activity of family history research is the accumulation of information; developing an awareness of cultural and historical context is essential to the practice, second only to the discovery and recording of birth, marriage and death dates. Psychologists have argued that reminders of the ‘problem of death’, such as may occur in person when experiencing the reality of a family member’s death, or importantly for this research, at a distance when downloading a copy of an ancestor’s death registration from an online database, can create anxiety. Terror management theory, as developed by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon and colleagues (e.g., Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon, 1986; Greenberg and Arndt, 2011), suggests that individuals deal with this anxiety through both proximal and distal cognitive defense strategies. Proximal defenses serve as a first line of defense against conscious deathrelated thoughts (Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon, 1999), and can include suppressing thoughts of one’s own death, seeking distractions to banish thoughts of death, rationalization strategies which deny one’s current vulnerability (e.g., recalling that one is a non-smoker who maintains a regular work-out schedule) and cognitive distortions such as relocating one’s death into a distant future time. Distal defenses occur when death-related thoughts are accessible but not in current consciousness or of focal attention. They work at a more symbolic level by reassuring the individual that s/he is ‘a valuable contributor to a meaningful, eternal universe’ (Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon, 1999, p. 839). By making one’s life seem meaningful, valuable, and enduring, distal defenses provide a sense of security. This type of defense operates in a more subtle fashion; an example provided by Pyszczynski and colleagues (1999) is forming more favorable evaluations of others who praise one’s culture and more negative evaluations of those who criticize it. Importantly, these researchers relate that although mortality salience has been operationalized in a variety of ways over multiple studies, the focus of research under terror management theory has been on the effects of thoughts about the research participant’s own death. ‘These effects are specific to thoughts of one’s own death; parallel effects are not produced by other aversive or anxiety-producing stimuli’ (Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon, 1999, p. 836). To the extent that family historians identify motivations closely associated with their own lives or identities, terror management theory may provide additional insight into their consumption behaviors.
