Contemplative Practice and Responses to Mortality Salience: Evidence from Long-Term Sufi Meditators

Abstract

Mortality salience research has played a central role in understanding responses to death awareness and existential threat. At the same time, relatively little research has examined whether long-term contemplative practice may shape affective, cognitive, and implicit responses to mortality-related stimuli. The present study investigated these processes in long-term contemplative practitioners from a Sufi tradition in which reflection on death occupies a central role. Participants completed an implicit measure of self- versus other-oriented attitudes before and after a mortality salience induction, along with self-report measures of anxiety, affect, and death-thought accessibility. Following mortality reminders, non-meditators reported higher anxiety and showed a relative increase in implicit prosocial orientation, consistent with defensive coping responses described in Terror Management Theory research. In contrast, long-term contemplative practitioners exhibited lower anxiety, a greater accessibility of death-related thoughts, and no increase in prosocial orientation following mortality salience. Greater meditation experience was associated with lower anxiety and negative affect. These findings suggest that sustained contemplative engagement may be associated with reduced existential defensiveness and more open engagement with death-related cognition. More broadly, the study highlights the value of investigating long-term contemplative practitioners in mortality salience research and points toward new directions for research on meditation, existential cognition, and adaptive responses to mortality awareness.