Behavioral and neural decomposition of skull-induced death awareness

Death awareness influences multiple aspects of human lives, but its psychological constructs and underlying brain mechanisms remain unclear. We address these by measuring behavioral and brain responses to images of human skulls. We show that skulls relative to control stimuli delay responses to life-related words but speed responses to death-related words. Skulls compared to the control stimuli induce early deactivations in the posterior ventral temporal cortex followed by activations in the posterior and anterior ventral temporal cortices. The early and late neural modulations by perceived skulls respectively predict skull-induced changes of behavioral responses to life- and death-related words and the early neural modulation further predicts death anxiety. Our findings decompose skull-induced death awareness into two-stage neural processes of a lifeless state of a former life. One sentence summaryBehavioral and brain imaging findings decompose skull-induced death awareness into two-stage neural processes of a lifeless state of a former life.