关键词: 死亡提醒, 恐惧管理, 存在不安全感, 控制感, 物质主义

Abstract: Nothing is more important than one's life and death. Research on Terror management theory (TMT) has suggested that three strategies, namely, supporting cultural worldviews, seeking for self-esteem, and defense of interpersonal belonging, would be taken to buffer existential insecurity when made aware of people's own inevitable death. In western, some researchers in the field of materialism have done lots of theoretical work as well as some empirical studies based on TMT. They found that existential insecurity is one of the chief causes of materialism. However, few researches examined this relationship in China. Considering the reality of modern China that materialism has gradually prevailed since the period of social transformation and death message has been exposed to us a lot in the New Media Era, the current research tried to use undergraduates' sample to fill this blank. The present study designed a situational experiment to inspect the relationship between existential insecurity and materialism in Chinese culture, and explore the mediating role of seeking perceived control as well. The current study recruited volunteers from a normal university in Wuhan, getting a convenience sample of 75 valid subjects (20 males and 55 females; Mage = 19.64, SD = 1.66). The experiment used a slightly revised version of mortality salience paradigm, to activate high existential insecurity (N = 38) by mortality salience material and low existential insecurity (N = 37) by Taoism nature material. Then, sense of control was measured in line with the previous study (Liu, Wang, & He, 2014) and emotion was measured by a revision of the PANAS (Qiu, Zheng, & Wang, 2008). Next, Classical delay manipulation (Guo, 2003) was also used to keep death anxiety in the unconscious level. After that, explicit materialism tendency was measured by a forest-management game (Kasser & Sheldon, 2000) and a bonus allocation situation. Finally, implicit materialism attitude was measured by the single category implicit association test (SC-IAT). The results of the experiments indicated that: (1) subjects in the mortality salience condition(M = -.09，SD = .33), compared with subjects in the Taoism nature material (M = -.23, SD = .24), had more positive attitudes toward materialism at the implicit level, t(73) = 2.21, p < .05, d = .51. However, this materialism difference was not significant at the explicit level. (2) Bias corrected Bootstrap-test showed that the mediating effect of perceived control between existential insecurity and implicit materialism attitude was significant (LLCI = .0003, ULCI = .1080; indirect effect of X on Y = .03; ab/c = 20.29%). The inconsistencies of the results between implicit and explicit could be interpreted from three main aspects: (1) experimental procedure; (2) individual difference; (3) culture difference. All in all, the current study not only concluded that for Chinese college students, existential insecurity was one of the chief cause of materialism, but also indicated that seeking for sense of control was a motivational mechanism. And there were two main contributions in the present study: (1) To some degree, we provided new empirical evidence for the motivational mechanism of TMT. (2) To the best of our knowledge, it was the first time that SC-IAT had been used to measure materialism, which might solve the social desirability issue effectively.

Key words: mortality salience, terror management, existential insecurity, sense of control, materialism