Terror management theory (tmt)
Terror management theory (TMT) is how we deal with day to day life while still being aware of our own mortality. It’s what keeps us from being consumed by our own fears and anxieties.
[[ psychology ]] mortality salience hypothesis nostalgia
From the article below:
asserts that people are able to live with relative psychological equanimity in the face of this awareness through investing and maintaining faith in psychological structures (e.g., self-esteem, relationships, cultural worldviews) that buffer death anxiety by imbuing life with meaning, order, significance, and self-transcendence.
Jacob Juhl, Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt, Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, Fighting the future with the past: Nostalgia buffers existential threat, Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 44, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 309-314, ISSN 0092-6566, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2010.02.006. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656610000310)
Another study with similar info:
Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt, Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, A blast from the past: The terror management function of nostalgia, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 44, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 132-140, ISSN 0022-1031, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2006.11.001. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103106001661) Abstract: According to terror management theory, people turn to meaning-providing structures to cope with the knowledge of inevitable mortality. Recent theory and research suggest that nostalgia is a meaning-providing resource and thus may serve such an existential function. The current research tests and supports this idea. In Experiments 1 and 2, nostalgia proneness was measured and mortality salience manipulated. In Experiment 1, when mortality was salient, the more prone to nostalgia participants were, the more they perceived life to be meaningful. In Experiment 2, when mortality was salient, the more prone to nostalgia participants were, the less death thoughts were accessible. In Experiment 3, nostalgia and mortality salience were manipulated. It was found that nostalgia buffered the effects of mortality salience on death-thought accessibility. Keywords: Nostalgia; Mortality salience; Death-thought accessibility; Meaninglessness; Self-protection