Mahoney, Melissa (5/15) Obsessive-compulsive personality as a means of terror management (Benjamin A. Saunders, Ph.D.;Nicole M. Cain, Ph.D.; Nicholas Papouchis, Ph.D.)
This study examined obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCP) as a means of terror management. The pilot study showed that a `double-death' prime, which involved the presentation of each prime successively, was most effective at eliciting an awareness of mortality (i.e. mortality salience). The research then sought to show that those higher in OCP tendencies were faster to process detail information than those lower in OCP tendencies. Subjects ( N = 138) completed a self-report measure of OCP tendencies and the Navon (1977) global versus local task. In contrast to previous research, the two groups (high and low OCP tendency) did not respond differently to global information presented with distracting local (detail) information. However, the high OCP tendency group had significantly faster reaction times to detail information. The research then examined whether mortality salience (MS) affected participants' responses to a visual scanning task. Participants were presented with a double-death MS prime and were then asked to complete the visual scanning task a second time as well as measures of their conscious death and annihilation anxiety. Results indicated that high OCP tendency participants perform faster on visual detail information processing after MS than without MS and faster than those low in OCP tendency. OCP positively correlated with death anxiety and annihilation anxiety. Performance on global information processing moderated the relationship between OCP and death anxiety. Implications for personality specific defenses to MS are discussed.
