Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Bélanger, JocelynSubject: search.filters.subject.motivation

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    The Psychology of Martyrdom
    (2013) Bélanger, Jocelyn; Kruglanski, Arie W; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In recent decades, social scientists' interest for the topic of self-sacrifice has been accentuated by the growing incidence of suicide attacks around the world. The present set of twelve studies aimed to investigate the psychological underpinnings of the readiness to self-sacrifice by (1) creating a new tool to quantitatively assess individuals' propensity toward self-sacrifice (Studies 1-7), (2) investigating the motivational forces potentiating self-sacrifice (Studies 8-10), and (3) finding ways of redirecting these forces in a peaceful direction (Studies 11 and 12). Beyond creating a psychometrically sound measure of self-sacrifice, present research guided by the quest for significance theory (Kruglanski, Chen, Dechesne, Fishman, & Orehek, 2009) indicated that individuals' motivation to self-sacrifice is augmented when their sense of personal worth is lowered. In addition, results indicated that when the quest for personal significance is activated in conjunction with hostile ideologies, individuals are more likely to relinquish their physical and emotional well-being to harm others.