Behavioral research suggests that reminding both mortality and negative affect influences self-related thoughts. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we tested the hypothesis that reminders of mortality and physical pain decrease brain activity underlying self-related thoughts. Three groups of adults underwent priming procedures during which they answered questions pertaining to mortality, physical pain, or leisure time, respectively. Before and after priming, participants performed personality trait judgments on oneself or a celebrity, identified the font of words, or passively viewed a fixation. The default-mode activity and neural activity underlying self-reflection were identified by contrasting viewing a fixation vs. font judgment and trait judgments on oneself vs. a celebrity, respectively. The analyses of the pre-priming functional MRI (fMRI) data identified the default-mode activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and parahippocampal gyrus, and the activity underlying instructed self-reflection in both the ventral and dorsal regions of the MPFC. The analyses of the post-priming fMRI data revealed that, relative to leisure time priming, reminding mortality significantly reduced the default-mode PCC activity, and reminding physical pain significantly decreased the dorsal MPFC activity during instructed self-reflection. Our findings suggest distinct neural underpinnings of the effect of reminding morality and aversive emotion on default-mode and instructed self-reflection.
Keywords: Self-reflection; fMRI; medial prefrontal cortex; mortality salience; posterior cingulate cortex.