ArticleCerebral cortex communications2021
Brain Activation during Thoughts of One's Own Death and Its Linear and Curvilinear Correlations with Fear of Death in Elderly Individuals: An fMRI Study.
Article in Cerebral cortex communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Training the embodied self in its impermanence: meditators evidence neurophysiological markers of death acceptance.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Why people hesitate to help: Neural correlates of the counter-dynamics of altruistic helping and individual differences in daily helping tendencies.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Social-coalitional trait is related to coping capacity with mortality threat: association with leadership and a reduced parietal response to mortality salience.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Ictal fear of death with preserved context dependent speech and postictal amnesia in focal epilepsy.Frontiers in neurologyArticle
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Facing one's own death and managing the fear of death are important existential issues, particularly in older populations. Although recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated brain responses to death-related stimuli, none has examined whether this brain activation was specific to one's own death or how it was related to dispositional fear of death. In this study, during fMRI, 34 elderly participants (aged, 60-72 years) were presented with either death-related or death-unrelated negative words and asked to evaluate the relevance of these words to the "self" or the "other." The results showed that only the left supplementary motor area (SMA) was selectively activated during self-relevant judgments of death-related words. Regression analyses of the effect of fear of death on brain activation during death-related thoughts identified a significant negative linear correlation in the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) and an inverted-U-shaped correlation in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) only during self-relevant judgments. Our results suggest potential involvement of the SMA in the existential aspect of thoughts of death. The distinct fear-of-death-dependent responses in the SMG and PCC may reflect fear-associated distancing of the physical self and the processing of death-related thoughts as a self-relevant future agenda, respectively.
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