According to the terror management health model (TMHM), life‐threatening health conditions have the potential to make people think about death, which triggers anxiety and motivates people to engage in defensive behaviors that may or may not facilitate health. This model has been used to explain health‐defeating reactions to the COVID‐19 pandemic (e.g., intentional nonadherence to mitigation guidelines) and to inform recommendations for current and future public health campaigns. Unfortunately, these recommendations do not account for psychological reactance, an aversive motivational state known to undermine persuasive messages. For this reason, we argue that the TMHM for pandemics is incomplete in its current form and should be expanded to account for reactance processes. We also highlight two reactance‐reducing strategies (inoculation messages and restoration postscripts) that could potentially increase the efficacy of the public health messages proposed by the TMHM for pandemics. We conclude with a discussion of how psychological reactance theory can augment the TMHM more broadly. Overall, we hope to illustrate both the utility and feasibility of considering more than one theoretical approach when designing empirically supported public health messages.

中文翻译：

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自由自在地生活和死亡：扩大大流行的恐怖管理健康模式以应对心理反应

根据恐怖管理健康模型（TMHM），威胁生命的健康状况有可能使人们思考死亡，这会引发焦虑并激发人们采取可能有助于健康的防御行为。该模型已用于解释对COVID-19大流行的危害健康的反应（例如，故意不遵守缓解指南），并为当前和未来的公共卫生运动提供建议。不幸的是，这些建议并未考虑到心理反应，心理反应是一种令人反感的动机状态，已知会破坏说服力。因此，我们认为大流行的TMHM目前尚不完整，应扩展为应对电抗过程。我们还着重介绍了两种降低电抗的策略（接种信息和恢复后记），有可能提高TMHM提出的针对大流行病的公共卫生信息的功效。最后，我们讨论了心理反抗理论如何更广泛地增强TMHM。总体而言，我们希望说明设计经验支持的公共卫生信息时考虑多种理论方法的实用性和可行性。