Culture and its neurofunctional correlates when death is in mind

- The interplay of death reminders and cultural coping is tested on a neural level.
- Death priming preceding the viewing of culture content was associated with specific brain activation patterns.
- Neither neutral nor meaning-threat priming preceding cultural content were associated with such activation.
- This supports the idea that notions of mortality evoke cultural worldview defense.

The human fear of death is marked by specific psychological reactions that affirm cultural belonging. Terror management theory explains this phenomenon with the symbolic immortality provided by collective meaning in culture. This coping has also been explained with the motive of maintaining a meaningful representation of the world. Here we show that neural patterns of activations corresponding to cultural worldview defense processes differed when images that affirmed participants' cultural heritage were preceded by death-related verbal primes versus verbal primes threatening meaning. Cultural content was drawn upon distinctly on a neural basis when facing death-related cognitions. The neural representation of cultural coping sheds light on the immediate mechanisms in compensating the human fear of death.