Death anxiety
Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one's own death, and is also known as thanatophobia. This anxiety can significantly impact various aspects of a person's life. Death anxiety is different from necrophobia, which refers to an irrational or disproportionate fear of dead bodies or of anything associated with death. Death anxiety has been found to affect people of differing demographic groups as well, such as men versus women, and married versus non-married. The sociological and psychological consensus is that death anxiety is universally present across all societies, but different cultures manifest aspects of death anxiety in differing ways and degrees.
Death anxiety is particularly prevalent in individuals who experience terminal illnesses without a medical curable treatment, such as advanced cancer.
Researchers have linked death anxiety with several mental health conditions, as it often acts as a fundamental fear that underlies many mental health disorders. Common therapies that have been used to treat death anxiety include cognitive behavioral therapy, meaning-centered therapies, and mindfulness-based approaches.
Types
proposed three different causes of death anxiety: predatory, predator, and existential. In addition to his research, many theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, and Ernest Becker have examined death anxiety and its impact on cognitive processing.Predatory death anxiety
People experience death anxiety both consciously and unconsciously. Concerns about death play a significant role in the development of many emotional dysfunctions. Predatory death anxiety arises from the fear of being harmed. It is the oldest and most basic form of death anxiety, with origins in the first unicellular organisms' set of adaptive resources. Unicellular organisms have receptors that have evolved to react to external dangers, along with self-protective, responsive mechanisms made to increase the likelihood of survival in the face of chemical and physical forms of attack or danger. In humans, predatory death anxiety is evoked by a variety of dangerous situations that put one at risk or threaten one's survival. Predatory death anxiety mobilizes an individual's adaptive resources and leads to a fight-or-flight response, consisting of active efforts to combat the danger or attempts to escape the threatening situation.Predation or predator death anxiety
Predation or predator death anxiety is a form that arises when an individual harms another, physically and/or mentally. This form of death anxiety is often accompanied by unconscious guilt. In Freudian theory, unconscious guilt is genetically embedded into people from their prehistory, religious upbringing, ancestral religious affiliation, and a person's personal ethics. The unconscious sense of guilt and its effects are not truly unconscious. The idea or impulse that has undergone repression creates a rising feeling of guilt due to disproportionate feelings. This guilt, in turn, motivates and encourages a variety of self-made decisions and actions by the perpetrator of harm to others.Existential death anxiety
Existential death anxiety stems from the basic knowledge that human life must end. Existential death anxiety is known to be the most powerful form of death anxiety. It is said that language has created the basis for existential death anxiety through communicative and behavioral changes. Other factors include an awareness of the distinction between self and others, a full sense of personal identity, and the ability to anticipate the future. The existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom asserts that humans are prone to death anxiety because "our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and inevitably, diminish and die."Human beings are the only living things that are truly aware of their own mortality and spend time pondering the meaning of life and death. Awareness of human mortality arose some 150,000 years ago. In that relatively short span of evolutionary time, humans have fashioned a single basic mechanism through which they deal with the existential death anxieties this awareness has evoked: denial. Denial is affected through a wide range of mental mechanisms and physical actions, many of which go unrecognized. While denial can be adaptive in limited use, excessive use is more common and is emotionally costly. Denial is the root of such diverse actions as breaking rules, violating frames and boundaries, manic celebrations, directing violence against others, attempting to gain extraordinary wealth and power, and more. These pursuits are often activated by a death-related trauma, and while they may lead to constructive actions, more often than not they lead to actions that are damaging to self and others.
Measuring death anxiety
There are many ways to measure death anxiety and fear. In 1972, Katenbaum and Aeinsberg devised three propositions for this measurement. From this start, the ideologies about death anxiety have been able to be recorded and their attributes listed. Methods such as imagery tasks to simple questionnaires and apperception tests such as the Stroop test enable psychologists to adequately determine if a person is under stress due to death anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.The Lester attitude death scale was developed in 1966 but not published until 1991 when its validity was established. By measuring the general attitude towards death and also the inconsistencies with death attitudes, participants are scaled to their favorable value towards death.
The Death Anxiety Scale was created in 1970 by Templer, and it is one of the most widely used tools to assess death anxiety today. The scale itself is a self-report questionnaire that contains 15 true or false items, and it is used to assess an individual's fear and anxiety related to death. It was one of the first standardized assessment tools created specifically for measuring death anxiety, and it has been used in both clinical and nonclinical populations. Although the DAS has played a big role in shaping the empirical understanding of death anxiety, it is important to note that its design reflects a more Western conceptualization of death anxiety. Thus, its cultural sensitivity and generalizability across diverse populations should be taken into account when assessing the scale's validity and reliability.
One systematic review of 21 self-report death anxiety measures found that many measures have problematic psychometric properties.
Sex
The connection between death anxiety and one's sex appears to be strong. Studies show that females tend to have more death anxiety than males. In 1984, Thorson and Powell did a study to investigate this connection, and they sampled men and women from 16 years of age to over 60. The Death Anxiety Scale, and other scales such as the Collett-Lester Fear of Death Scale, showed higher mean scores for women than for men. Moreover, researchers believe that age and culture could be major influences in why women score higher on death anxiety scales than men.Through the evolutionary period, a basic method was created to deal with death anxiety and also as a means of dealing with loss. Denial is used when memories or feelings are too painful to accept and are often rejected. By maintaining that the event never happened, rather than accepting it, allows an individual more time to work through the inevitable pain. When a loved one dies in a family, denial is often implemented as a means to come to grips with the reality that the person is gone. Closer families often deal with death better than when coping individually. As society and families drift apart so does the time spent bereaving those who have died, which in turn leads to negative emotion and negativity towards death. Mothers hold greater concerns about death due to their caring role within the family. It is this common role of women that leads to greater death anxiety as it emphasize the 'importance to live' for her offspring. Although it is common knowledge that all living creatures die, many people do not accept their own mortality, preferring not to accept that death is inevitable, and that they will one day die.
Age and sex
Using the Collett-Lester Fear of Death scale, studies can be performed to examine the age and sex effects on death anxiety. In 2007, two studies were compared to support these claims and they discovered the evidence that was needed. The studies claim that death anxiety peaks in men and women when in their 20s, but after this group, sex plays a role in the path that one takes. Either sex can experience a decline in death concerns with age, but the studies show an unexpected second spike in women during their early 50s. Regardless of sex, once the age of 60 is reached death anxiety levels seem to decrease and stabilize to a low level.According to a study of elderly men and women in a care facility, many were not as worried about what happens to their soul beyond death, but more, what challenges they would face in relation to their personal health deterioration and self esteem. It was also observed that women seem to be more concerned with others they will be leaving behind and the loss of those around them, in many cases even moreso than themselves.
Another study which compared black and white men and women over the age of 65 found that race and sex are not the greatest determiner of death anxiety in elderly age. The age of the individuals ended up being a greater predictor of death anxiety than the other two variables previously mentioned. Age was the greatest predictor in how much death anxiety women had, but not in men. This study also found that this difference in death anxiety between sexes may be caused due to the different ways men and women communicate with other people specifically about death.