Word-stem completion rate validly measures how close death thoughts are to consciousness

Evidence

WE CONSTRUCTED A LIST of twenty word stems, six of which could be completed with either death-related words or non-death-related words. We figured that the more death-related completions people produced, the more death thoughts were hovering on the fringes of their consciousness. To see if this technique worked, we had people fill in the stem words a few minutes after they responded to our usual essay questions about death. Sure enough, the folks who wrote about themselves dying produced more death-related words than those in the control condition. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 177

Categorization

• XREF: A clearn example of an unobtrusive implicit measure — parallels the word-completion tasks used in priming and stereotype research.