Fear of Death and Supernatural Beliefs: Developing A New Supernatural Belief Scale to Test the Relationship

Abstract

Fear of death features in both historical and contemporary theories of religion, but the relationship between death anxiety and religious belief is still ambiguous, largely due to the use of inappropriate or imprecise measures. The current studies therefore aimed to develop a valid, targeted measure of respondents' tendency towards religious belief, the ‘Supernatural Belief Scale’ (SBS), and to use the SBS to examine the relation between death anxiety and religious belief. Results indicate that the SBS shows high reliability and convergent validity and that its relation to death anxiety depends on participants' religious identification: ‘religious’ participants fear death less the stronger their religious beliefs, whereas ‘non‐religious’ participants are more inclined towards religious belief the more they fear death. These studies contribute a new measurement tool for research on religious belief and provide a starting point for an experimental integration of discrepant research findings. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology

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“…Items assess the self (e.g., "I am afraid of dying"), comparisons to others (e.g., "I am more concerned with death than those around me"), as well as whether death is viewed as a positive or negative aspect of life (e.g., "death should not be regarded as a tragedy if it occurs after a productive life"). Anderson (1979) did a comparison of fear of death scales using college students and found the Dickstein scale significantly accurate, and the scale is still being utilized for contemporary research with reliabilities comparable to those found here (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2013 …”

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“…These data provide evidence for the convergent validity of the SBS, and show that low negative SBS scores indicate strong disbelief and that high positive scores indicate strong belief. Further data on the scale's psychometric properties and validity can be found in Jong et al (2011).…”

“…In Study 1 we examined participants' explicit reactions to mortality salience using the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (SBS; Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2011). In contrast to previous research that has indiscriminately measured religious attitudes, values, experiences, and behaviors, the SBS targets respondents' tendency to believe in supernatural entities and events (e.g., god, heaven, miracles).…”

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“…General religiosity was measured with six items, derived from the Supernatural Belief Scale (Jong et al, 2013) and the "intrinsic items" from the Intrinsic/Extrinsic Religiosity Scale (Gorsuch & McPherson, 1989; e.g., "My faith is important to me"), which were combined into a single scale (Cronbach's α = .80; M = 4.08, SD = .70; range = 2.50-5.00).…”

“…We included measures related to general religiosity (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2013), afterlife beliefs (Atkinson & Bourrat, 2011), free-will beliefs/belief in Predestination (Baumeister, Masicampo, & DeWall, 2009), belief in a controlling God , and Figure 1. Theoretical model representing the hypothesized relation between the different theoretical constructs and the way in which these constructs were measured.…”