1 THE AUTONOMIC PHYSIOLOGY OF TERROR MANAGEMENT ...

prepares the body for massive action, and specifically, fight-related or flight-related
action that throughout mammalian history has been particularly well suited for dealing
with threat.
Left unchecked, the immense human potential for threat and fight or flight related
psychological reactions would be debilitating. Becker and TMT propose that self-threat
steers cognitive resources toward the threat, and thus narrows the flexibility and utility of
cognitive resources for self-regulation. Paradoxically, then, the self-awareness and
cognitive flexibility that allows for enhanced self-regulation threatens to take away this
regulatory ability or freedom of reactivity by way of amplifying feelings of anxiety,
threat, and insecurity. Thus, TMT posits that we are motivated to address this potential
for anxiety both simply because this insecurity is aversive to our organism, and also
because regaining equanimity is necessary for flexible and adaptive functioning.
Humans must control these threat feelings, as any organism programmed to
survive and to hold on to life would be driven to do. To this end, TMT proposes that
humans strive to generate and maintain symbolic security. We work to counter our
finiteness and fragility and transitory nature with faith in a symbolic world that seems
meaningful and permanent, and a symbolic conception of self that is a valuable and thus a
protected part of this permanent meaning system. People’s sense of self shifts from one
with a physical basis that is clearly always fallible and vulnerable to extinction, to a
symbolic one enmeshed in an immortal cultural worldview, and thus a self that is less
vulnerable to deterioration and ultimate annihilation.
12