Abstract: Self-awareness may contribute to our concerns about mortality by facilitating the realization of the inevitability of death. The more aware one is about one's existence, the more salient and inescapable the problem of nonexistence is. When people are thinking about their own death or when death-related thoughts are in their current focal awareness, they are motivated to avoid attention on the self to reduce death anxiety. Despite growing research interested in the effect of mortality salience on self-related information, no studies so far have examined the effect from the perspective of mental self. In addition, the effect has been demonstrated in numerous experiments with young adults as participants but has rarely been tested in older individuals. And previous studies have shown that there are many differences between the younger and older. For example, death anxiety of the elderly is lower than the younger. Using a mortality salience priming task and self-referential paradigm, the present study investigated the impact of mortality salience on self-related information from the perspective of mental self as well as the age differences on the effect. We speculated that the younger would avoid self-referential cognitive processes under mortality threats from the perspective of mental self, but the older would not.
In experiment 1, a 2 (group:mortality salience, negative affect)×3 (referential target:self, celebrity, valence) mixed experimental design was adopted. Fifty-five healthy college students were included in the experiment and randomly divided into the mortality salience group and the negative affect group. Participants in mortality salience group were asked to answer two open questions about death, and participants in negative affect group were presented with 28 statements that were related to negative emotion. All participants first finished the priming task followed by a manipulation check of the priming effect. After that, each participant was asked to perform 40 calculations in 5 minutes, which served as a delay between the priming task and the self-referential processing task. In experiment 2, a same mixed experimental design was adopted. Fifty-eight healthy old people (>60 years old) participated in the experiment and were randomly divided into the mortality salience group and the negative affect group. The procedure was identical to that of experiment 1, except that participants in the negative affect group were asked to answer two open questions about physical pain.
The results indicated that (1) self-related information led to significantly better recognition than celebrity or valence both in the elderly and young (ps<0.001); (2) relative to negative affect priming, mortality salience priming disturbed recognition of self-related trait adjectives in the younger (p<0.05); (3) there was no significant difference between the mortality salience priming group and the negative affect priming group in self-related recognition rate in the elder (p>0.05).
As a whole, the results of the current study replicated the findings of most publications showing that there was a stabilizing self-referential effect in memory for trait adjectives. Moreover, we found that there was an age difference on the effect of mortality salience on self-related processing:the younger avoided the self-referential cognitive processes under mortality threats, but the older did not.

Key words: mortality salience, self, self-referential memory, age differences