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.