Personification of Death, as Seen in Adjective Check List Descriptions, among Funeral Service and University Students

Abstract

One hundred twenty-nine undergraduate psychology students at a large urban university and 55 students at a college of funeral service completed the Death Anxiety Questionnaire (Conte, Weiner,&Plutchik, 1982), the Revised Death Anxiety Scale (Thorson&Powell, 1994), a nine question measure of belief in an afterlife (Daws, 1980), and used the 300-item Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough&Heilbrun, 1980) to describe what death might be like if personified as a human character in a play. Three Affective Meaning scores, five Transactional Analysis ego state scores, five Five Factor Model scores, and a Sex-Stereotype Index score were calculated based on ACL descriptions of the character of death. Lower death anxiety was associated with more positive ACL descriptions of death in both samples; however, belief in an afterlife was associated with differences in death personification only among university students. Men described death as higher on the Adult ego state than did women. In addition African Americans described death as a more positive character than did European Americans. Similarly, funeral service students described death as feminine, favorable, strong, but not active, more like a Nurturing Parent, and high on Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability; whereas, university students described death as masculine, neutral on Favorability, more like a Critical Parent, and low on Agreeableness and Emotional Stability.

The Effects of Mortality Salience on Disgust Sensitivity Among University Students, Older Adults, and Mortuary Students

“…Mortuary students were chosen because previous research has shown that they are less anxious about death than university students [23,24]. No research known to the authors has examined psychological defenses of any kind in response to mortality salience among mortuary students.…”

Personifications of Personal and Typical Death as Related to Death Attitudes

“…Similarly, Cotter (2003) found that women were more likely than men to personify death as feminine and as a gentle-comforter. Bassett and Williams (2002) reported that funeral service students personified death more favorably than did university students. Further, the favorability of personifications of death has been shown to be negatively correlated with death concerns (Bassett & Williams, 2002;Lonetto, 1982).…”

“…Bassett and Williams (2002) reported that funeral service students personified death more favorably than did university students. Further, the favorability of personifications of death has been shown to be negatively correlated with death concerns (Bassett & Williams, 2002;Lonetto, 1982). Tomer (2000) called for the need to make a conceptual and methodological distinction between examining individual attitudes toward death in general and attitudes toward personal death.…”

“…An additional goal of the present study was to examine individual differences in personifications of death as a function of death attitudes. Although previous research has examined death personifications as related to negative emotional reactions to death (Bassett & Williams, 2002), recent developments in assessing attitudes about death have focused on measuring not just negative attitudes but also neutral and positive attitudes. Wong, Reker, and Gesser (1994) developed the Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R) in response to what they perceived to be a negativity bias in assessing attitudes about death.…”

Personification of Death: What Types of Death Are Personified by Macabre, Gentle Comforter, Gay Deceiver, and Automaton?

“…Yet, a more recent study by Cotter (2003) shows death anxiety levels carry no significant relation to the way people personify death. McDonald and Hilgendorf (1986) found that those having a positive image of death personified death as being young, and Bassett and Williams (2002) later found that less death-anxious individuals depicted death with a more positive image.…”