The survival processing effect, as demonstrated by Nairne (2007) and others, has consistently shown that inducing ancestral survival processing of studied words results in recall rates that surpass any other known rating tasks. While Nairne and others are convinced this is not due to depth of processing, we attempted to compare survival processing against a stronger control condition than used previously. Our new control condition was intended to induce deep elaboration of the studied words by invoking ratings on the items' usefulness for escaping from imprisonment. We argue that this scenario does not invoke ancestral survival processing but does encourage novel, elaborative rehearsal of the studied items. Our results indicate that there is no escape processing advantage, as performance did not differ from control conditions, while survival processing did result in superior performance similar to that demonstrated by Nairne and others. We suggest that our findings show the survival processing advantage is not due to deep elaborative rehearsal.