Measuring Fear of Death: A Multidimensional Approach

Abstract

In the research literature on death and dying, two assumptions are often made: 1) the prospect of death is universally anxiety-provoking and 2) death fear is a unidimensional construct. In order to explore the veracity of these assumptions, participants were shown a film designed to manipulate fear of death. Scores on a trait and a state measure of death fear were related to belief in an afterlife and response latencies to death words and neutral words in a word association test. While a previous finding linking increased belief in afterlife with a death-threat situation was not supported, it was found that high scores on the Templer fear of death scale were correlated with longer response latencies to death than to neutral words on the word association test. This indicates a positive association between a “direct” and “indirect” measure of fear of death, undermining the commonly held assumption that low scores on a fear of death scale are indicative of repression. Moreover, since fear of death was seen to increase in the experimental group (according to a state measure), while no change was observed on the Templer fear of death scale (a trait measure), this suggests that death fear is not a unidimensional construct.