“We’ve known from many studies that reminders of death arouse a need for terror management and therefore increase self-esteem striving though performance on relatively simple laboratory tasks. However, these experiments are the first to show that activating this motivation can influence performance on complex, real-world behaviors,” said Greenberg, who was another co-author of the studies, along with UA psychology doctoral student Peter Helm.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161101103242.htm