A Look at the Internal Impact of War on Children and Possible Psychological: View from a Terror Management Perspective
Olivia Daskaloff
University of New York in Prague
To understand the impact of war, it helps to look at the underpinnings from which war come from. Psychologists have examined the driving forces in the human nature that encompass the capability for such behavior during war, as well as the results of these harms. To tackle this question, psychologists and historians have had to look at conflict in the beginning of time and how it was solved. A common paradigm used to explore the origin of the motivations of war would be the terror management theory. This theory, though it does not justify these behaviors, sheds some light onto the manifestations of its behalf. Developed by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Soloman terror management theory (TMT) generally states that human behaviors are driven by the terrifying awareness of death which causes individuals to protect themselves by “investing in cultural belief systems (or worldviews) that imbue life with meaning, and the individuals who subscribe to them with significance (or self-esteem)” (TMT, 2008). The Terror Management Theory is based on a self-esteem system in which serves as a protection against the anxiety of death. When self-esteem is threatened, healthy coping mechanisms may be abandoned. “According to TMT, domination, humiliation, and perceived injustice threaten the self-esteem and cultural worldviews that protect people from death-related anxiety; the result may be hostility and violence directed against the threatening out-group as a way of defusing this threat” (Pyszczynski, Rothschild & Abdollahi, 2008). This theory provides a basic understanding of how people react in circumstances that impact their well-being and gives psychologists an opportunity to learn how to rebuild damaged self-esteems in individuals. Children,...