Nothing Is Certain Except Taxes and the Other Thing: Searching for Death Anxiety in a Large Online Sample

Collabra Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1525/collabra.87507
Sina Storelv, Bjørn Sætrevik
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Abstract

Philosophical and psychological literature has suggested that death anxiety has a profound impact on people’s lives and is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Such claims motivated us to examine how people express their emotions and attitudes toward death in short free-text responses. We explored a qualitative dataset where 803 Americans stated their thoughts about either death or physical pain (toothache). Comparing these, we found that death prompts caused the expression of less negative affect and more positive affect than toothache prompts. The reactions to death were quite diverse and did not appear to be dominated by existential anxiety. We discuss whether this pattern may be due to psychological defense against death causing negative emotions, or whether the pattern reveals a “true” preference for contemplating death rather than toothache. The article serves as a companion for an open dataset, to allow other researchers to explore and reuse it.
没有什么是确定的,除了税收和另一件事:在一个大型在线样本中搜索死亡焦虑
哲学和心理学文献表明,死亡焦虑对人们的生活有着深远的影响,是人类意义的一个基本方面。这种说法促使我们研究人们如何在简短的自由文本回复中表达他们对死亡的情绪和态度。我们研究了一个定性数据集,其中803名美国人陈述了他们对死亡或身体疼痛(牙痛)的看法。比较这些提示,我们发现死亡提示比牙痛提示引起的消极情感表达少,积极情感表达多。对死亡的反应相当多样,似乎并不受存在焦虑的支配。我们讨论了这种模式是否可能是由于心理防御死亡导致的负面情绪,或者这种模式是否揭示了对死亡的“真正”偏好而不是牙痛。本文作为开放数据集的伙伴,允许其他研究人员探索和重用它。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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