Despite forty years of research in death attitudes, our understanding of the causes, correlates, and consequences of death related anxieties and fears remains less than comprehensive. However, clear gains have been made in the measurement of death concerns and competencies, leading to the development and validation of a handful of scales whose more extensive use could improve the conceptual yield of research in this area. In this article, I review these promising approaches to the assessment of death attitudes, as well as a number of theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding their use. If investigators devote equal attention to the quality and quantity of future research, there is reason to hope that psychology could make a more profound and systematic contribution to our understanding of the human encounter with death.
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