Why bother? Death, failure, and fatalistic withdrawal from life.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current research examines the conditions under which death contemplation will reduce, rather than increase, goal directed activity. By employing a goal-regulation perspective on the problem of death, we hypothesized that death awareness precipitates withdrawal from the goal for continued life when life is experienced as dissatisfying and hope for the future appears bleak. In Study 1, participants with low life satisfaction who contemplated goal failure responded to mortality salience with reduced desire for continued life. Studies 2-4 examined general goal motivation. Consistent with the idea that withdrawal from life precipitates a general state of reduced goal motivation, parallel effects were observed on the willingness to delay gratification for future outcomes (Study 2), orientation toward the future (Study 3), and behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivity (Study 4). Moreover, Study 3 showed that these effects were mediated by a generally pessimistic attitude toward life. Finally, Study 5 assessed felt uncertainty and state depression, revealing that withdrawal from life was associated with reduced uncertainty but increased depression. Discussion is focused on implications for theories of threat and defense, and applications for understanding depression and suicide.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".