Characterization of near death experiences using text mining analyses: A preliminary study

Abstract

The notion that death represents a passing to an afterlife, where we are reunited with loved ones and live eternally in a utopian paradise, is common in the reports of people who have encountered a "Near-Death Experience" (NDE). NDEs are thoroughly portrayed by the media but empirical studies are rather recent. The definition of the phenomenon as well as the identification of NDE experiencers is still a matter of debate. To date, NDEs' identification and description in studies have mostly derived from answered items in questionnaires. However, questionnaires' content could be restricting and subject to personal interpretation. We believe that in addition to their use, user-independent statistical text examination of freely expressed NDEs narratives is of prior importance to help capture the phenomenology of such a subjective and complex phenomenon. Towards that aim, we included 158 participants with a firsthand retrospective narrative of their self-reported NDE that we analyzed using an automated text-mining method. The output revealed the top words expressed by experiencers. In a second step, a hierarchical clustering analysis was conducted to visualize the relationships between these words. It revealed three main clusters of features: visual perceptions, emotions and spatial components. We believe the user-independent and datadriven text mining approach used in this study is promising by contributing to the building a rigorous description and definition of NDEs.

The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) scale: Development and psychometric validation

“…Thus, the newly developed NDE-C scale takes into account the diversity of the emotions felt by the experiencers by including an item regarding positive emotions (NDE-C5) as well as an item regarding negative emotions (NDE-C15). Additionally, items recently identified by rigorous qualitative thematic analyses as being key elements of NDEs were added: the experience of a gateway (NDE-C19), the impression of being dead (NDE-C18), the decision to come back from the experience (NDE-C17) and ineffability (NDE-C20) (Cassol et al, 2018;Charland-Verville et al, 2020;Martial et al, 2017b). The gateway item was intentionally formulated so that individuals from different cultures could score if an experience of gateway was experienced, whether it was reported (or interpreted) as a tunnel, a door or something else.…”

“…reviewed the literature to develop new items relevant to the construct being measured. Five items were added to address features that are now known to be characteristic of the NDE phenomenon: negative emotions (Cassol et al, 2019b;Greyson & Bush, 1992), the experience of a gateway (Charland-Verville et al, 2020;Martial et al, 2017b), the impression of being dead (Cassol et al, 2018;Charland-Verville et al, 2020;Martial et al, 2017b), the decision to come back from the experience (Cassol et al, 2018;Charland-Verville et al, 2020;Martial et al, 2017b), and ineffability (Cassol et al, 2018).…”

Continuous EEG of memories of Near-death and mystical experiences: Preliminary research

“…[34][35][36][37][38][39] Similar to NDEs, some experiences occur during the terminal phase of illness and are called deathbed vision. 37,[40][41][42][43][44] Although these results cannot simply be correlated with human experiments, it suggests the brain's remaining activity may explain the NDE. 45,46 As mentioned earlier, we have found, from anecdotal observations, that occasionally, when teaching CP to students, they would relive their previous NDE experience during their CP.…”

Representações de experiências de quase morte

“…Em um terceiro estudo linguístico (CHARLAND-VERVILLE et al, 2020), os pesquisadores compilaram um corpus de relatos de EQMs, por meio da retrospectiva narrativa de 158 participantes. A fim de prevenir a subjetividade do estudo, evento natural quando se trata da observação humana de fenômenos, os pesquisadores usaram, tal como nos estudos anteriormente citados, procedimentos de PLN, no domínio da Análise Semântica Latente.…”