Reduced recall of death-related words suggests automatic death-thought suppression

According to terror management theory, humans automatically suppress death-related thoughts when reminded of their own mortality. We evaluated this claim of automatic death-thought-suppression using a think/no-think paradigm. If people automatically suppress death-related thoughts, recall of death-related target words should reduce compared to other word categories both after suppression-induced forgetting, but also in the baseline condition. 182 participants took part in a think/no-think paradigm with death-related words, neutral words, and a semantic category (i.e., animals) as target words. As expected, participants recalled less death-related target words without instruction to suppress death-related target words in the baseline condition. In the no-think condition, recall of death-related target words was lower than recall of animals. Participants did not show a general suppression-induced forgetting effect, potentially because fewer cognitive resources were available for suppression-induced forgetting. Overall, our results suggest a distinct processing of death-related thoughts.