Virtually every mental health problem carries stigma, but suicide appears to run so counter to our accumulative, achievement-oriented society, that it poses even greater threat of stigma. While suicide is inherently troubling in that it opposes the fundamental human instinct for self-preservation, the tendency to stigmatize and reject individuals affected by suicide appears to be counterproductive and excessive. Hence, the purpose of this three-manuscript dissertation is to gain a more nuanced understanding of suicide attitudes from an exploratory and terror management theory perspective. More specifically, this dissertation attempts to answer three general questions: (1) how do suicide attitudes differ from other stigmatized deaths – namely, unintentional opioid overdose, (2) does death anxiety and baseline self-esteem impact attitudes toward suicide, and (3) can the effects of death anxiety on suicide attitudes be reversed by temporarily boosting self-esteem? To address the first question, Study 1 compares suicide attitudes to attitudes toward opioid overdose death – another type of stigmatized death that has emerged as a major public health issue in the U.S. in recent years. Study 2 addresses the second question by examining the effect of mortality salience on attitudes toward suicide and by investigating whether participants’ baseline self-esteem will moderate this effect, in keeping with the theory’s claim that self-esteem buffers against death anxiety. Building on the theoretical assumptions of the second study, Study 3 tests whether the effects of death anxiety on suicide attitudes can be reversed by temporarily bolstering the participant’s self-esteem using experimental manipulation. In other words, can cultural worldview validation and self-esteem enhancement inhibit the awareness of personal death and promote prosocial attitudes and behavior? All three proposed studies used quantitative research strategies to examine the research questions detailed above. Study 1 used a traditional questionnaire method to explore and compare attitudes toward suicide and drug overdose death; whereas Study 2 and 3 employed an experimental design to test the MS hypothesis on suicide attitudes. Participants were recruited online using an inexpensive crowdsourcing service called Amazon MTurk. Findings from these studies could have important implications for how we understand the psychological underpinnings of suicide stigma and contribute to the growing body of evidence of the role of existential mortality concerns in hostile attitudes and discriminatory behavior. Not only are we confronted with death reminders in our everyday lives, the topic of suicide is inherently a reminder of death – making the problem of death anxiety even more relevant and unavoidable. These findings could expand our understanding of how cultural worldview and self-esteem are relevant to mitigating death anxiety, and the relationship between death anxiety and suicide.

Research on existential mortality fears has indicated that death reminders impact individuals at the cognitive and behavioral levels. One way people cope with this threat is through cherishing cultural values that provide life with meaning. However, little research has explored how death reminders impact cultural standards regarding gender. These cultural values often manifest through various means by male and female groups. Guided by terror management theory, which posits that people address threats to their existence by engaging in culturally-sanctioned behaviors to enhance their self-esteem, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of mortality salience (MS) on male participants' propensity for sexism and attitudes towards those with atypical gender stereotypes. Participants (n = 136) were recruited from courses at a local university and were selected based on the assumption that they had been exposed to media depicting death-related events. A quantitative research design was used to examine differences between the experimental MS and control pain salience conditions, and to assess effect sizes. Results from a MANOVA indicated that MS was associated with significantly higher sexism scores (F = 15.322, p < .001) as measured by the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, and with less favorable ratings of peers (as measured by a common opinion rating scale used in previous research in this area) who violated traditional gender stereotypes (F = 13.459, p < .001). The findings imply existential threats may contribute to negative stereotyping based on gender and enhance conservative views of gender stereotypes. Implications for social change are discussed involving the reduction of intolerance and prejudice directed at those who hold opposing worldviews.

Since 2000, the southern Israeli town of Sderot and a neighboring rural region, Otef Aza, have been frequently exposed to nearly identical terror attacks by Hamas. While only a small minority of Otef Aza residents have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), more than a third of Sderot residents have been diagnosed with PTSD. Factors such as social cohesion and ideology may be the unique factors that protect Otef Aza kibbutzim residents from PTSD; however, a gap in the literature exists as to how these same factors might affect PTSD symptomology in Sderot residents. Orthodox religiosity has also been associated with reduced PTSD symptoms in Sderot; however, previous research on religiosity has analyzed demographic characteristics and did not use a measure assessing dimensions of religiosity. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the impact of sense of community, ideology, and religiosity on PTSD symptoms among Sderot residents. The theoretical foundation of this study was the diathesis-stress model of PTSD. A survey was completed by a convenience sample of Sderot residents (n = 118). Standard multiple linear regression revealed that ideology, intrinsic religiosity, nonorganizational religious activity, and the fulfillment of needs dimension of sense of community were significant predictors of PTSD symptomatology. Study findings suggested protective factors which could help a large portion of the population. These findings have implications for positive social change for the residents of Sderot by enhancing their opportunities for increased positive interactions, well-being, and meaning and value in their lives.

As the U.S. population ages the number of family caregivers is expected to rise. Family caregivers are a valuable source of informal healthcare services for patients and the public, in terms of reducing healthcare costs. However, research suggests family caregiving is not only financially costly for individuals, but associated with a number of medical and mental health risks, with spouses at higher risk for negative outcomes compared to other family members. Traditional evidence-based therapies for stress in family caregivers have been shown to be minimally efficacious with spouses. No therapies take into account the existential nature of spouse caregiver stress, including the potential nonconscious role of loss of life meaning/purpose and death anxiety. This study of multiple baseline design preliminarily explored the effects of a novel 8-week Terror Management Theory integrated existential psychotherapy (TIE) on stress and nonconscious mechanisms believed to function as buffers for existential anxiety, in five women with spouses receiving cancer treatment. Methods included ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of anxiety and self-esteem states via text message sent three times daily – and intermittent assessment of death anxiety, self-compassion, meaning in life, and quality of life at baseline, intervention, immediate post, and 1-month follow-up. Visual and statistical analyses indicated significant between-phase trend changes in anxiety and self-esteem within participants, although direction of changes varied across participants. Additionally, changes in death anxiety, self-compassion, meaning in life, and quality of life between phases varied across participants in directions inconsistent with intervention aims and participants’ subjective impressions of intervention-related changes. Mixed findings point to the complexity of spouse caregiver psychology and highlight the need for more effective therapies with this population. Results may also guide future research and development of existentially-informed therapies.

Gothic literary works are characterized as such by their ability to represent and evoke terror. The form this representation takes is varied; often terror originates in the atmospheric effects of settings, in the appearance of mysterious, supposedly supernatural phenomena, and, perhaps most significantly, in the behavior of villainous characters. Shakespearean tragedy participates in just such an exploration of the origins and effects of terror. This thesis will examine three aspects of the Shakespearean Gothic in three of his most frightening and disturbing tragedies: Macbeth, King Lear and Titus Andronicus. All three of these texts represent terror in ways that are significant not only for genre studies but for historicist cultural studies as well. Shakespeare's particular vision of the terrible tends to represent unruly women and ethnic minorities as demonized others who threaten normalized social and moral order, and also evokes a religious dread--a fear of the cruelty or, more radically, the nonexistence of God--that would have proved particularly disturbing for Early Modem Christian culture. This reading of Shakespeare demonstrates both the influence of his vision on later writers and the trans-historic applicability of the Gothic aesthetic. / Graduation date: 2004

The aim of the current thesis was to explore the possible link between System Justification Theory (SJT) and Terror Management Theory (TMT) in gender context and from the perspective of intergroup relations in a sample of Turkish university students. Having recently attracted research attention, the relation between the two theories is based on the effect of mortality salience (MS) on the tendency to justify the existing system. Accordingly, three research questions were investigated to see whether (1) ambivalent sexism toward women (hostile and benevolent sexism / HS and BS, respectively) and gender-group favoritism (on both explicit and implicit measures / expGF and impGF, respectively) were related to gender-specific system justification (GSJ), and whether (2) gender and (3) MS moderated the relation of GSJ to ambivalent sexism and gender-group favoritism. Based on the literature, it was hypothesized that (1) GSJ would predict HS, BS, expGF, and impGF, and that these predictions would be stronger (2) among women than among men and (3) when mortality is made salient as compared to when it is not. The hypotheses were tested with 185 participants (86 men, 99 women) who completed a questionnaire package including the demographic information form, GSJ Scale, MS manipulation, Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, and a scale measuring expGF along with a computer-administered task for impGF. The results revealed that higher levels of GSJ predicted higher levels of benevolent and hostile attitudes toward women as well as higher levels of explicit ingroup favoritism and lower levels of favoritism toward women. Only GSJ &ndash / HS and GSJ &ndash / expGF relationships were moderated by gender. The moderating role of MS was not observed in any of the four relationships. However, GSJ scores were found to be unevenly distributed across MS conditions, thereby, casting doubt on the reliability of the results concerning the moderating role of MS. The findings, as well as the contributions and limitations of the study, were discussed.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores the inextricable relationship of the ordinary and extraordinary which characterizes the lives of U.S. soldiers severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan and rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. in 2007-2008. Living among their fellows and families at Walter Reed, the precariousness which marks injured soldiers’ bodies and lives takes on a feeling of ordinariness. And though these injured soldiers and their families do not quite coalesce into a community, their shared experience of being in common with each other—of sharing Walter Reed’s particular and precarious ordinary—helps make life there bearable. Through a poetics of the extra/ordinary I explore how injured soldiers’ ordinariness bristles against inescapable invocations of patriotic sacrifice; the ways soldiers’ everyday movements are marked by being post-traumatic; and the reconfigurations of intimate social relations and masculinity such experiences occasion and out of which the possibilities and limits of a future life emerge. I show that in this moment of life—one which unfolds in a space saturated with narratives of heroic patriotic sacrifice and histories of war and the remaking of men—ordinariness becomes central to injured soldiers’ current experiences and also to the future selves and social configurations they are oriented towards. I demonstrate how injured soldiers’ lives are also always attached to something that exceeds the ordinary; that they are extra/ordinary. But I argue that such extra/ordinariness is an amplification of life’s less notable uncertainties; that all lives are extra/ordinary. Against the over-determining frames of heroism and trauma within which U.S. soldiers are figured, especially in post-9/11 America, I argue that injured U.S. soldiers’ experiences are neither simply knowable, nor unimaginable but recognizable as specifically tethered to, commensurable with, and distinguished from, more ‘ordinary’ others.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores the inextricable relationship of the ordinary and extraordinary which characterizes the lives of U.S. soldiers severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan and rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. in 2007-2008. Living among their fellows and families at Walter Reed, the precariousness which marks injured soldiers’ bodies and lives takes on a feeling of ordinariness. And though these injured soldiers and their families do not quite coalesce into a community, their shared experience of being in common with each other—of sharing Walter Reed’s particular and precarious ordinary—helps make life there bearable. Through a poetics of the extra/ordinary I explore how injured soldiers’ ordinariness bristles against inescapable invocations of patriotic sacrifice; the ways soldiers’ everyday movements are marked by being post-traumatic; and the reconfigurations of intimate social relations and masculinity such experiences occasion and out of which the possibilities and limits of a future life emerge. I show that in this moment of life—one which unfolds in a space saturated with narratives of heroic patriotic sacrifice and histories of war and the remaking of men—ordinariness becomes central to injured soldiers’ current experiences and also to the future selves and social configurations they are oriented towards. I demonstrate how injured soldiers’ lives are also always attached to something that exceeds the ordinary; that they are extra/ordinary. But I argue that such extra/ordinariness is an amplification of life’s less notable uncertainties; that all lives are extra/ordinary. Against the over-determining frames of heroism and trauma within which U.S. soldiers are figured, especially in post-9/11 America, I argue that injured U.S. soldiers’ experiences are neither simply knowable, nor unimaginable but recognizable as specifically tethered to, commensurable with, and distinguished from, more ‘ordinary’ others.

This dissertation examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality as they are negotiated through a variety of (new) media contexts. The dissertation demonstrates that media technologies in general, and videogames in particular, serve an existential or “death denying” function, which insulates individuals from the terror of mortality. The dissertation also discusses the hero as a rhetorical trope, and suggests that its relationship with immortality makes it a particularly powerful persuasive device. Chapter one provides a historical overview of the hero figure and its relationship with immortality, particularly within the context of ancient Greece. Chapter two examines the material means by which media technologies serve a death denying function, via “symbolic immortality” (inscription), and the McLuhanian concept of extension. Chapter three examines the prevalence of the hero and villain figures in propaganda, with particular attention paid to the use of visual propaganda in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter four situates the videogame as an inherently heroic, death denying medium; videogames can extend the player’s sense of self, provide quantifiable victory criteria, and allow players to participate in “heroic” events. Chapter five examines the soldier-as-hero motif as it appears in two popular genres, the First Person Shooter, and Role-Playing Game. Particular attention is paid to the Call of Duty series and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Chapter six outlines an “epistemological exercise,” which attempts to empirically test the claims made in the previous chapters via Terror Management Theory, an experimental paradigm which examines the relationship between mortality, self-esteem, and ideology. The conclusion discusses how videogames can contest prevailing views of the heroic, and calls for a departure from contemporary game design practices.

What I dub the “worst-result” principle is a criterion that identifies civil war and tyranny as the worst evils that could befall a state, and prescribes their prevention. In this thesis, I attempt to define the worst-result principle’s concrete prescriptions and institutional arrangements to meet these. To do so, I explore different understandings of the worst-result principle, that each contributes to the general argument. Montesquieu’s crucial insight concerns the separation of powers to prevent the state from collapsing into despotism. Judith Shklar shows that ‘damage control’ needs to be constantly performed so as to minimize chances of governmental brutality. Roberto Unger points at the importance of encouraging citizens’ involvement in the political process to safeguard freedom. I finally argue, in the light of historical evidence, that it would be unreasonable to think that the task of preventing tyranny can be effectively performed in the absence of courts entrusted with checking powers.