This study examined the media's influence on 147 college students' views of death. Utilizing the revised Collett-Lester Fear of Death Scale, the Incomplete Sentence Blank task, the NEO Five-Factor Inventory measure of Anxiety, the Byrne Repression-Sensitization Scale, and the Media Consumption Scale, a series of MANCOVAs indicated that greater death anxiety was related to the portrayal of group deaths in the media. Results indicated that in some cases, general references to death by the media may bring death fears into consciousness and have no effect on the unconscious, yet specific, real-life examples may increase both unconscious and conscious death fears. In general, conscious and unconscious death fears increased with greater death related media exposure.
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