Mortality salience, effort, and cardiovascular response to a bar‐press challenge: Remarkably nuanced effects of a death prime on heart performance

We presented participants with a bar‐pressing challenge relevant to their identity after having exposed them to a prime that made their mortality more or less salient. For some participants, difficulty was low; for others, it was high; for the rest, it was unfixed. As expected, heart pre‐ejection period responses—reflecting heart contraction force—were (a) stronger under high‐salience conditions when difficulty was high and unfixed, but (b) low regardless of salience when difficulty was low. Findings bear out conceptually and extend results from a previous experiment. In doing so, they add substantively to a new line of support for terror management theory and document the predictive utility of a proposed blended analysis of associated effort processes. The blended analysis speaks to the way in which motives to manage existential terror should convert into active goal striving and to the impact that existential threat might have on aspects of autonomic arousal. Terror management theory implies that people should be especially inspired to approximate worldview standards when reminded of their mortality. The present research tested this by evaluating effort‐related cardiovascular responses under prescribed achievement conditions. Heart contractility responses provided support, bearing out conceptually, and extending results from a previous study.