Your Culture May Influence Your Perception Of Death

From the 24 May 2011 Medical News Today article

Contemplating mortality can be terrifying. But not everyone responds to that terror in the same way. Now, a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds cultural differences in how people respond to mortality. European-Americans get worried and try to protect their sense of self, while Asian-Americans are more likely to reach out to others.

Much of the research on what psychologists call “mortality salience” – thinking about death – has been done on people of European descent, and has found that it makes people act in dramatic ways. “Men become more wary of sexy women and they like wholesome women more. People like to stereotype more. You see all these strange and bizarre occurrences when people think about the fact that they aren’t going to live forever,” says Christine Ma-Kellams of the University of California Santa Barbara, who carried out the research with Jim Blascovich. Particularly, people try to protect their sense of self, by putting down people who aren’t like them or distancing themselves from innocent victims. …..

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