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Terror

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

  • 94 Accesses

Synonyms

Death anxiety; Existential angst; Fear of death

Definition

Terror is defined as a uniquely human emotional reaction to the explicit awareness that we are mortal beings destined to die and that this fate is unpredictable, irreversible, and inevitable.

Introduction

Terror is an extreme emotional reaction to the awareness of death, yet, few people experience such raw and unregulated terror in their daily lives; in fact, most people seem to be oblivious to this dire predicament. Social anthropologist Ernest Becker was perplexed by the apparent discrepancy between the human potential to experience paralyzing terror, the actual infrequency of this response, and the relative calm in which people manage to go about their daily lives. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Becker (1973) argues that humans are motivated to constantly deny their mortality and expend significant cognitive resources on mechanisms that push thoughts of death out of awareness because “the...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel

    Gilad Hirschberger & Tsachi Ein-Dor

Authors
  1. Gilad Hirschberger
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  2. Tsachi Ein-Dor
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gilad Hirschberger .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Psychology, University of Lodz, Smugowa 10/12, 91-433, Lodz, Poland

    Monika Wróbel

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

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Hirschberger, G., Ein-Dor, T. (2016). Terror. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_559-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_559-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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