High self-esteem and optimism enable constructive responses to death threats.

Evidence

There seem to be two basic determinants of more beneficial coping. First, people with high self-esteem are less fearful of death and therefore less in need of distractions and rationalizations when a real death threat arises—say, a serious heart arrhythmia or a cancerous melanoma. They are better able to confront these matters head-on. Second, optimistic people, who tend to believe that exercise, medical care, and healthy living can effectively prolong their lives, are more likely to seek diagnoses and engage in health-promoting behaviors. Pessimists, who tend to doubt that much can be done, are much more likely to seek distractions or deny the threat. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 656

Related

• Worldview and self-esteem defense is bidirectional with death-thought accessibility. (similarity 0.83)
• Self-esteem is embodied, not just mental, and blunts death-anxiety (similarity 0.82)
• Self-esteem functions as protection against the terror of death (similarity 0.81)
• People pursue self-destructive trends most avidly when death thoughts are unconscious (similarity 0.81)
• Subtle death reminders drive worldview defense, self-esteem striving, and unhealthy behavior. (similarity 0.81)
• Self-esteem buffers people against death-related anxiety. (similarity 0.80)
• Knowing how death awareness drives defenses enables more self-determined choices (similarity 0.79)
• Death-awareness drives humans to cling to cultural worldviews and self-esteem (similarity 0.79)
• Mildly depressed people respond to death reminders with amplified nationalism (similarity 0.78)