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Does Our Fear Of Death Stem From Threatened Belongingness?, Stan Treger

College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the relative contribution to worldview defense (i.e., upholding one’s cultural worldviews) provided by the thoughts of one’s death and perceptions of curbed close relationships.

The need to belong, to form meaningful and strong ties with others, is what many social psychologists believe to be one of the most fundamental and strongest motivations that humans possess (Baumeister, 2012; Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010; Tomasello, 2014). The human brain is “hard-wired” to be around others (Beckes & Coan, 2011). In fact, large social group sizes of humans’ evolutionary past may have contributed …

Death In Life: Approaches To The Contemporary Denial Of Death In Theoretical & Experimental Psychology And Continental Philosophy, Madeline R. Runstrom

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this thesis explores the theme of death in life. This thesis particularly examines the work of Phillipe Ariès, Ernest Becker, Terror Management theorists (TMT), Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche. These thinkers are united in their diagnosis of a severe and unhealthy contemporary denial of death. Death has never been repressed as thoroughly as it is in the current era in western culture, to the point that the exclusion of death may well be the characteristic that centrally distinguishes, and threatens the welfare of, our age. However, as I show in Chapter One, in a number of …