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Are We Happier Facing Death?(e-c)practice
Are We Happier Facing Death?
面临死亡是否更快乐？
Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2007 By SORA SONG
A heart surgery scar
Jim Zuckerman / Corbis
Here's one for the annals of counterintuitive findings: When asked to contemplate the occasion of their own demise, people become happier than normal, instead of sadder, according to a new study in the November issue of Psychological Science. Researchers say it's a kind of psychological immune response — faced with thoughts of our own death, our brains automatically cope with the conscious feelings of distress by nonconsciously seeking out and triggering happy feelings, a mechanism that scientists theorize helps protect us from permanent depression or paralyzing despair.
根据《心理科学》杂志第十一期刊的一份新研究表明，在历来对违反人们直觉的发现中都存在的一个是：当被问及考虑人们自己的死亡时，人们会比平常的时候更幸福，而不是更悲伤。研究者称这是一种心理防御反应--当面临我们自己死亡的想法，我们的大脑会自动通过无意识地搜寻出并触发快乐的感觉来对付有意识地悲痛感觉。 科学家们对这种机制做出的理论是它能保护我们不会永远沮丧或具有使我们麻痹的绝望。
It might explain the shift toward more positive emotions and thought processes as people age and approach death, and the preternaturally positive outlook that some terminally ill patients seem to muster. Though it looks a lot like old-fashioned denial, that's not the case, says lead author Nathan DeWall. It's not that "'I know I'm going to die, but I just con myself into thinking I'm not.' I don't think that's what's going on here," says DeWall. "I think what's happening is that people are really unaware of [their own resilience]" — whereas, with denying behavior, people usually know they're engaging in it — "so, when people are exposed to serious threats, such as when they consider their own death, which is about as serious as it gets, people are coping, but they're completely unaware of it."
这可能解释了为什么人在变老及临近死亡时，为什么会出现朝着更积极感情和思维的转变；解释了一些 虽然，病患末期病人为什么具有超自然地积极态度。 研究首席作者Nathan DeWall称虽然这看上去很像是一种传统否定，其实并非如此。DeWall说”并不是‘我知道我要死了，但是我只是在让我想我不会’我认为其实人们想的不是这一点，我想是人们是没有意识到【他们自己的”精神弹性“】“--相反，对于否认行为，人们往往是知道自己身处其中”--“所以，当人们面临严重威胁下，例如，当他们考虑自己的死亡这种最糟糕的情况，人们在进行应对，只是完全没有意识到这一点”
DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University tested that theory — the so-called "terror management theory" — in a series of experiments involving 432 undergraduate volunteers. About half of the students were asked to contemplate dying and being dead, and to write short essays describing what they imagined happening to them as they physically died. The other half of the group was asked to think and write about dental pain — decidedly unpleasant, but not quite as threatening. The researchers then set about evaluating the volunteers' emotions: First, the students were given standard psychological questionnaires designed to measure explicit affect and mood. Then they were given assessments of nonconscious mood: in word tests, volunteers were asked to complete fragments such as jo_ or ang_ _ with letters of their choice. Some word stems were intended to prompt either neutral or emotionally positive responses, such as jog or joy; others could be filled in neutrally or negatively — angle versus angry. In a separate word test, students paired a target word such as mouth with its best match: cheek, which is similar in meaning, or smile, which is similar in positive emotional content.
肯塔基州州立大学的心理学家DeWall和佛罗里达州州立大学Roy Baumeister 已经测试了这个说法--所谓的“恐怖管理论”--在对423名大学生自愿者的一系列实验中。要求大约有一半学生思考正在死亡或已经死亡，并写描述他们想象死后自己身上发生的事情的短篇故事。另一半学生被要求思考和描写牙疼--绝对是令人不愉快地，但是并没有死亡那么有威胁性。随后研究者开始对自愿者的情感进行评估：首先，他们给学生标准心理调查问卷。它们用于检测明确影响和心情。 然后，他们给学生进行了无意识情绪评估：在语言测试中，自愿者被要求完成例如jo_or ang_ _的单词完形填空。 一些词干是为了激发中性或积极情绪反应，例如:jog或joy；另一些可能填中性或消极--angle 和angry。在另一项单词测试中， 学生们对于比方什么是mouth的最佳搭配来说，会给出意思上最相近的词cheek，也可能积极情绪上与之最接近的词smile。
Students in the death-and-dying group, it turns out, had all gone to their happy place — at least in their unconscious. There was no difference in scores between the groups on the explicit tests of emotion and affect. But in the implicit tests of nonconscious emotion — the wordplay — researchers found that the students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group. DeWall thinks this mental coping response kicks in immediately when confronted with a serious psychological threat. In subsequent research, he has analyzed the content of the volunteers' death essays and found that they're sprinkled with positive words. "When you ask people, 'Describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,'" says DeWall, "people will report fear and contempt, but also happiness that 'I'm going to see my grandmother' and joy that 'I'm going to be with God.'"
结果，处于死亡和正在死亡小组的学生们都感到快乐--至少是无意识地。在明确情绪和影响的测试中，两组学生的分数没有差异。但是在无意识情绪的隐性测试中--即：单词游戏--研究者们发现那些脑子开始装了死亡的学生们往往比考虑过牙疼的学生写出带有强烈地多的积极情绪的词汇及搭配。 DeWall认为当遇到一种严重心理威胁时这种大脑应对反应会立即产生。在后续的研究中，他分析了自愿者们写下的有关死亡的文章内容，并且发现里面零星会有积极词汇。DeWall说：”当你问人们‘描述一下对自己的死亡思考时会引起你什么情绪“时，人们会称它们是恐惧和轻蔑，可是同样有”我会去见我的祖母“和”我要和上帝同在了“这样的幸福感和快乐感”
If the premise of DeWall's study seems too contrived to apply to the real world, consider this: While the number of people actually confronted with death at any given time is extremely small, the number who are going to die at some point is 100%, says Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, from whose research the term "psychological immune response" springs. "We are all walking around, unlike every other animal, thinking, 'Oh, my God, eventually this all ends,'" says Gilbert. "This creates a state of existential dread. This knowledge pervades our everyday existence." The point of the current study, therefore, is that our psychological immune system doesn't respond to imminent death, but to the fact of death — to the thought that death is inexorable.
哈佛大学心理学教授 Daniel Gilbert，如果说DeWall的研究的前提看上去过于”引人上钩“而不能应用于现实，想象看：虽然那些真正和死亡有面临死亡的人们的数目是极其少，但是将要死的人是百分之百。在他的研究中有”心理免疫机制“一词。 Gilbert说：“我们和别的任何动物都不同，我们会想”哦，来天，最终这一切都会结束，这会制造一种对存在的恐惧状态。这个想法弥漫于我们时时刻刻的生活中” 因此目前研究的关键是我们的心理免疫系统不会对即将来临的死亡做出反应，而是会对死亡这一个事实--产生死亡是无情得这一想法--做出反应。
In his current research, DeWall is finding that other threats, such as that of social rejection, elicit a similar psychological immune response — except, intriguingly, in depressed people — and he thinks that it's a mechanism that healthy people are probably employing constantly, as a way of fending off a lifetime of serious misfortunes: not just the looming specter of death, but also the fact that you're not going to get that promotion, or that your spouse is cheating on you, or that your kid is on drugs. "It's very difficult to keep people in bad moods, and I think this is one of the reasons why," says DeWall. "Let's say we didn't have this. I think we would have a lot more difficulty coping with failure and threats and our own mortality. It would be difficult for us to find solutions. We would be thinking about how bad we were feeling all the time."
在Gilbert目前研究中，他发现了有其它的威胁--例如，社交遭到拒绝时--会产生一种类似地心理免疫反应--有趣地是，除了处于抑郁的人们--他认为这是健康人时常会采用的一种机制，一种避免永远都处于严重不幸的方法：不仅仅是阴森地逼近的“死神”，而且还有你将不能获得晋升、或者你的配偶对你不忠诚，或者你的孩子在吸毒。DeWall说：“要让人们情绪不好很难，我想这就是其中一个原因。现在假设我们没有这种机制。我想要对付困难、威胁还有自身死亡，会困难地多得多。对人们找到解决方法会困难。我们一直都会想着自己总是感觉多么地糟糕“
So, if a healthy psychological immune system is a marker of well-being, then perhaps a lack of natural coping abilities signals poor mental health. But of course it's not as simple as all that. Long-term bad moods aren't necessarily a sign of maladjustment. Sometimes, it's just called adolescence.
因此如果说一个健康的心理免疫系统是快乐幸福地“打分员”，那么缺乏自然应对能力也许向精神健康程度低发出了信号。但是，有时候不那么简单。长期坏情绪不一定暗示不适应环境。有一些时候，可能只是因为青春期。
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