Evaluating explicit and implicit death attitudes in funeral and university students

Evaluating explicit and implicit death attitudes infuneral and university students

JONATHAN F. BASSETT & JAMES M. DABBS Jr.Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

ABSTRACT The present paper describes two studies assessing the relation of implicit death

attitudes as measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to explicit death attitudes as

measured by questionnaires. In Study 1, 45 university students and 51 funeral service students

completed the revised Death Anxiety Scale (DAS-R) and completed paper and pencil versions of

the IAT measuring how much they implicitly associated death with bad vs. good (death

valence), with anxious vs. calm (death anxiety), and with others vs. self (death denial). Both

groups showed stronger implicit associations of death with anxious rather than calm and bad

rather than good. Higher explicit death anxiety was associated with more implicit denial of

death. Compared to university students, funeral students scored lower on the DAS-R and the

IAT measure of implicit denial of death. In Study 2, 103 university students completed the DAS-

R, completed Palm Pilot versions of the IAT measuring death valence, death anxiety, and death

denial, and responded to questions about mortality-related decisions. Greater self-reported death

anxiety was associated with less approval of physician-assisted suicide, whereas greater implicit

denial of death was associated with less interest in having a living will and pre-arranging one’s

funeral.

Introduction

Psychologists have often held that people are incapable of accepting their own

mortality; as Freud put it, ‘‘in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his

own immortality’’ (1913/1953: 305). Kubler-Ross wrote that ‘‘in our unconscious

we cannot perceive our own death and do believe in our own immortality’’ (1969:

14). An alternate perspective advocated by Ernest Becker (1962, 1973) is that

thoughts of death are so aversive that they must be kept out of conscious

awareness. Becker (1973) argued that fear of death was not a symptom of

psychopathology but a universal human dilemma. Becker (1962) further asserted

that the cultural values and norms of a society (or what he called hero systems)

enable people to ward off potentially debilitating death anxiety by providing them

with a sense of immortality, which may take the form of belief in an afterlife or in a

Correspondence to: Jonathan F. Bassett, Department of Psychology, Southeastern Louisiana

University, White Hall, 310 W. Dakota Street, Hammond LA 70402, USA. Tel: (985) 549-2028;

Email: [email protected].

Mortality, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2003

ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online)/03/040352-20 # 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/13576270310001604022

transcendent self-worth resulting from a contribution to something more enduring

than the self. More recently, Firestone (1993: 501) suggested that fear of death

was a universal psychological phenomenon that all people experienced but denied,

writing ‘‘In denying death or displacing fear of death onto other concerns, most

people are able to function in their everyday lives without being overwhelmed by

anxiety and dread.’’ Additional advocacy for this position is the Terror

Management Theory (TMT; Solomon et al., 1991) assertion that avoiding fear

of death is a primary motivation for numerous human behaviours. Based on the

writings of Becker (1962, 1973), TMT describes a death anxiety buffer composed

of cultural worldview and self-esteem. By constructing a cultural worldview that

gives meaning, order, and stability to life and by feeling good about one’s self

because one is living up to the tenets of that worldview, people are able to

transcend death symbolically by identifying with something more enduring than

their corporal self.

Recently, TMT has been modified with the suggestion that there are two

separate systems that protect against death anxiety (Pyszczynski et al., 1999). The

first, labelled proximal defenses, are clearly related to death, occur when thoughts

of death are the current focus of conscious attention, and involve exaggerating

one’s longevity or focusing on one’s youth and the long length of time before death

must be confronted. The second, labelled distal defenses, are not clearly related to

death, occur when thoughts of death are outside of conscious awareness, and

involve boosting self-esteem and defending one’s cultural worldview. Presumably

these distal defenses ameliorate death anxiety by creating a sense of transcendence

through identification with something more permanent than one’s physical body.

Further, there is evidence that people’s initial response to reminders of death is to

suppress such thoughts and that this attempted suppression has an ironic effect of

making such thoughts highly accessible, thereby making distal defenses more

likely (Arndt et al., 1997). As a result, people may be aware of the proximal

defenses they use but unaware that their distal defenses are in any way related to

death.

Recent research has found support for this dual defense model by showing that

people’s initial response to experimentally induced thoughts of death is to

suppress such thoughts or to deny mortality by exaggerating their longevity

(Greenberg et al., 2000). These same authors found that a different type of defense

against death anxiety occurred when people were reminded of mortality but

subsequently distracted from those thoughts. It was under these conditions that

participants most strongly defended their cultural worldview by praising similar

others and derogating dissimilar others. Consequently, people may be able to live

protected from death anxiety because of the existence of these distal defenses that

operate outside conscious awareness.

While it seems likely that most people can meet the demands of day-to-day life

unhampered by existential dread stemming from thoughts of their finitude, the

question of whether or not fear of death is universal remains uncertain. The

philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1976) argues that fear of death is not universal and

points out several historical examples of human encounters with death not

Implicit death attitudes 353

characterized by fear, such as the early Christians who sought out martyrdom.

Kaufmann (1976) further provides several examples from literature in which death

is described as a natural, inevitable, and sometimes desirable event. Similar

evidence is provided by Durkheim’s (1897/1951) description of cultures where

individuals preferred death to dishonour. For example, he describes Danish

warriors who considered death in bed from old age or sickness as the worst type of

disgrace. These anecdotal writings suggest that the avoidance of death is not a

universal human motivation but rather a dimension on which people vary, with

some individuals actually being attracted to death in certain circumstances.

Evidence for little fear of death

Most attempts at assessing death attitudes have used self-report measures, such as

the Death Anxiety Scale (DAS; Templer, 1970). Kastenbaum (2000) points out

that, while scores on the DAS can theoretically range from 0 (not at all anxious

about death) to 15 (extremely anxious about death), most people score below the

midpoint of eight, indicating that they are not very concerned about death.

Similarly, Thorson and Powell (1994) and Wong et al. (1994) reported sample

means below the theoretical midpoint of their revised Death Anxiety Scale and

Fear of Death Scale respectively. In an attempt to move beyond death anxiety

scales, Kastenbaum (1996) found that when asked to write about a world in which

death did not exist, 93% of respondents evaluated such a world negatively, listing

aversive consequences such as overpopulation, breakdown of social order,

meaninglessness, and loss of religious beliefs. Kastenbaum argued that if people

were motivated by a denial of death they would have found a world without death

an appealing prospect. He interpreted people’s aversion to a world with no death

as indicative of the fact that people have accepted the inevitability of death as the

natural order of things.

Based on the evidence reported above, one might be lead to the conclusion that

most people are not very much concerned with death and anxiety about death

represents some form of pathology only to be found among more morbid

personalities. However, there does seem to be a human tendency to avoid

recognizing the reality of personal death, as evidenced by findings that most

people tend to overestimate the age at which they will die and their mental lucidity

at the time of death and to underestimate the duration, pain, and discomfort of the

dying process (Kastenbaum & Normand, 1990), that people are willing to endure

pain if lead to belief that tolerance for pain is associated with long life (Quattrone

& Tversky, 1984), and that people bias their reports of emotionality to be

consistent with bogus reports on the relation of emotionality and longevity

(Greenberg et al., 1993.)Perhaps this discrepancy as to how much people are actually concerned with

death is a function of an over-reliance on self-report measures. Neimeyer (1997:

100) points out that 95% of research on death anxiety has used questionnaire

measures when instead ‘‘investigators aspiring to study death anxiety would need

to delve below the level of conscious report’’. Florian & Mikulincer (1997: 373)

354 Jonathan F. Bassett & James M. Dabbs

offer similar advice, suggesting ‘‘researchers should try to tap both above and

below level of awareness manifestations of fear of death’’.

Measures of death anxiety based on reaction time

While the majority of research on death anxiety is based on self-report measures

(Neimeyer, 1997), some attempts have been made to examine death anxiety using

measures based on reaction time. One of the more popular of these measures is

the emotional variant of the Stroop task. The emotional Stroop task requires

participants to name the colour of ink in which stimuli of varying emotional

content appear. A large body of research indicates that colour-naming is slower for

words related to participants’ unique anxiety concerns than for words that are

emotionally neutral (see Williams et al., 1996). Feifel and Branscomb (1973)

found that participants had significantly slower colour-naming speeds for death

than for non-death words. Further, Feifel et al. (1973) used the emotional Stroop

task to measure death anxiety and found that compared to healthy adults,

terminally ill patients showed slower colour-naming speeds for death related

words than for control words. More recently, researchers found that on average

university students took longer to name the colour of death words than control

words but failed to find any relation between death anxiety as measured by the

Stroop to self-report measures of death depression (Saboonchi & Lundh, 1997),

death anxiety, or religiosity (Lundh & Radon, 1998).

The IAT

The present paper attempts to measure death attitudes using the Implicit

Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) a currently popular attitude

measure based on reaction times. The IAT was designed to assess pre-conscious

evaluations or attitudes by measuring the speed with which people can make

responses that demand pairing concepts together in their minds. In the typical

administration of the IAT, stimulus words belonging to each of four categories are

presented, one at a time, on a computer screen. A response on the right side of the

keyboard is required if the stimulus belongs to category A or category B and a

response on the left side of the keyboard is required if the stimulus belongs to

category C or category D. On the next trial the pairing would be switched such

that participants are required to make a right response for category A and category

C and a left response for category B and category D. The strength of association

between concepts is measured by the difference in reaction time. The IAT has

been used to show overall preferences (for example, participants show an implicit

preference for flowers over insects; Greenwald et al., 1998), to show group

differences (for example, entomologist show less of a preference for flowers over

insects than do university students, Citrin & Greenwald, 1998), and to measure

individual differences in racism (Greenwald et al., 1998; Dusgupta et al., 2000),

sexism (Rudman & Killianski, 2000), self-esteem (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000),

and political preference (Nosek & Banaji, 2001a). The reliability of the desktop


computer administration of the IAT is good with split-half reliability averaging 0.9

and test-retest reliability averaging 0.6 (Greenwald & Nosek, 2001).

The present paper describes two studies aimed at using the IAT to measure

individual differences in implicit attitudes about death and examining the relation

of these implicit attitudes to explicit death concerns. Study 1 compared the

implicit and explicit death attitudes of university and funeral students, whereas

Study 2 examined the relation of university students’ implicit death attitudes to

their explicit attitudes about organ donation, blood donation, living wills,

physician assisted suicide, and funeral arrangements.

Study 1: Death attitudes among funeral and university students

The validity of the IAT as a measure of death attitudes was assessed by comparing

the IAT scores of university students and funeral service students—two groups

who have been shown to hold differing explicit death attitudes. Funeral directors

report less death anxiety than university students (Schell & Zinger, 1984) and

funeral directors who are happy with their work report positive attitudes about

death (Keith, 1998). Further, students training to be funeral directors report less

death anxiety and personify death as less threatening than do university students

(Lonetto, 1982; Bassett & Williams, 2002). The more favourable attitudes about

death found among funeral students might reflect a selection bias because it seems

unlikely that people with high death anxiety would choose to train for careers in

the funeral industry.

Alternatively, funeral students’ greater exposure to death, which makes

sustained denial more difficult, could result in a less threatening conceptualization

of death. Such an interpretation is analogous to theorizing about the relation of

age and death anxiety. Kastenbaum (2000) points out that theories about the

relation of age and death anxiety fall into two categories: (1) those that assert that

death anxiety should increase with age as the actual time of death draws nearer

and (2) those that assert that death anxiety decreases with age as people have more

time to construct worldviews which incorporate the inevitability of death. He

further notes that this second class of theories is more consistent with the work of

developmental psychologists such as Erik Erikson (1979) who viewed the last

developmental hurdle as the acceptance of the limitations and finitude of one’s life

as it came to an end. Just as the approaching nearness of death makes denial of

mortality more difficult for older people, a chronic exposure to death should make

denial of mortality more difficult for funeral students. Consequently, funeral

students may be precociously forced to accommodate the inevitability of death

into their worldviews. If this is the case, then funeral students should evidence less

negative implicit and explicit death attitudes than university students.

Yet another possibility is that there are stronger motives for funeral students

more than university students to under-report how anxious they are about death.

Such a motivation could arise from social desirability or impression management

concerns such that funeral students feel more under pressure than university

students not to express fear of death to other people. Cognitive dissonance could


also give rise to funeral student’s motivation to under-report death anxiety.

Recognizing that one holds negative attitudes about death would be inconsistent

with a chosen occupation in funeral service and this dissonance could be

minimized by changing one’s attitude about death to be more positive. If funeral

students are motivated more than university students by cognitive dissonance or

impression management to under-report their actual death anxiety, then they

would show lower explicit but not implicit death concern than university students.

Method

Participants. Participants were 45 students enrolled in introductory psychology

classes at a large urban university and 51 students enrolled in classes at a college of

funeral service in the USA. The funeral service students were in their second year

of an 18-month programme to earn an associate of science degree in funeral

service with the goal of working in the funeral industry. Twenty-three (51%)

students at the funeral college reported having previous experience working in the

funeral service industry. The funeral students had on average 29.2 months of

previous funeral service work experience. The mean age of college of funeral

service students was 27.4 (SD=7.9), and the mean age of university students was

25.2 (SD=8.8). The demographics for both samples are presented in table 1.

Materials and procedure. Self-reported death anxiety was measured using the 25-

item Revised Death Anxiety Scale (DAS-R; Thorson & Powell, 1994) on which

participants rate on a Likert type scale from 0 to 4 the extent to which they agree

with statements such as ‘‘Coffins make me anxious’’ and ‘‘I fear dying a painful

death’’.

Implicit attitudes were measured using a paper and pencil version of the IAT

(Lemme & Banaji, 2000). Each IAT page contained 2 columns of 24 words, with

open circles to the left and right of each word. At the top of each column, above

the left and right circles, category labels were printed in capital letters with the

stimulus words belonging to each category printed in lower case letters below the

category labels.

TABLE 1. Sample demographics for Study 1

Funeral students University students

Men 30 17

Women 20 28

European American 25 23

African American 19 16

Asian American 0 1

Latin American 1 1


Participants completed the IAT by going down each column and marking the

circle to the left or right of each stimulus word to indicate the category it

represented. Participants were given 20 seconds for each page to categorize as

many words as they could. The relative strength of association between word types

was determined by comparing the number of circles correctly marked, in the 20-

second time limit, on each page, with more marks indicating a stronger degree of

association. An IAT assessing preference for flowers or insects served as practice,

which allowed participants to become proficient at the task. Three separate IATs

assessed the degree to which life and death were implicitly associated with death

anxiety (anxious vs. calm), death valence (bad vs. good), and personal mortality

(self vs. other). The category labels and word stimuli for each IAT are presented in

table 2.

IAT scoring. The more words a participant categorized in the 20-second time

limit the stronger their mental association between those categories. First, the

number of words categorized when pairing the category of death with the category

of calm was counted. Second, the number of words categorized when pairing the

category death with the category anxious was counted. Next, an implicit measure

of death anxiety was obtained by subtracting the number of words categorized

TABLE 2. Category labels and word stimuli for the implicit association test

Death anxiety

Death Life Anxious Calm

death life anxious calm

die live upset relaxed

dying living worried at ease

Death valence

Death Life Good Bad

death life great awful

die live terrific terrible

dying living wonderful horrible

Denial of personal mortality

Death Life Self Other

death life me they

die live my them

dying living mine their


when pairing death with calm from the number of words categorized when pairing

death with anxious. The larger the resulting score, the more participants implicitly

associated death with anxiety. Similarly, a death valence score was calculated such

that larger scores indicated participants’ greater implicit association of death with

bad. In addition, a denial of personal mortality score was calculated such that

higher scores indicated participants’ greater implicit association of death with

other.

Results

An initial look at the results focused on the responses of all participants regardless

of whether they were funeral or university students. Four research questions were

addressed:

(1) How much are people explicitly anxious about death?

(2) Do people implicitly view death as anxious or calm, as bad or good, and as

something that happens to other people or to themselves?

(3) How are these three implicit death attitudes related to each other?

(4) How are explicit death attitudes related to implicit death attitudes?

Consistent with previous research (Thorson & Powell, 1994), participants on

average reported death anxiety below the theoretical midpoint of 50 on this

measure with a mean of 38.1 (SD=16.1).[1] In contrast, participants showed

negative implicit death attitudes on the IATs as evidenced by significantly stronger

association of death more with anxious than with calm, more with bad than with

good, and more with other people than with self.[2] The extent to which the three

implicit death attitudes were related to each other was assessed using correlational

analysis (see table 3). There was a tendency for participants who implicitly

associated death with anxiety to also implicitly associate death with bad. The

relation of explicit and implicit death attitudes are presented in table 4, where it

can be seen that participants who scored high on explicit death anxiety tended to

score high on implicit denial of death, meaning they associated death with other

people more than with self. In answer to the research questions addressed in this

initial analysis, it can be concluded that participants were low in explicit death

anxiety but had negative implicit attitudes about death as evidenced by stronger

TABLE 3. Correlations among IAT measures of implicit death attitudes in Study 1

IAT anxiety IAT valence IAT denial

IAT anxiety – 0.37* 0.12

IAT valence 0.37* – 0.17

IAT denial 0.12 0.17 –

*p5 0.05.


associations of death with bad more than good, with anxious more than calm, and

with other people more than self. Further, there was little relation between

people’s explicit and implicit death attitudes.

A second approach to interpreting the results focused on examining the

differences in the implicit and explicit attitudes of funeral and university

students. As can be seen in table 5, funeral students reported significantly less

death anxiety on the DAS-R than did university students. Funeral students also

showed significantly less implicit denial of death on the IAT than did university

students. However, the two groups did not differ significantly on the IAT

measures of death anxiety and death valence. These findings indicate a

discrepancy, such that funeral students reported less anxiety about death than

did university students but showed just as much implicit death anxiety as

university students on the IAT measure.

Study 1: discussion

The results of the present study further elucidate the following questions: (1)

how anxious are people about death, (2) are those in the funeral industry really

TABLE 4. Correlations of IAT measures with self-reported death anxiety in Study 1

DAS-R scores

University students Funeral students Pooled

(n=45) (n=51) (n=96)

IAT Score

IAT anxiety 0.04 7 0.25 7 0.11

IAT valence 7 0.11 7 0.17 7 0.14

IAT denial 0.23 0.15 0.24*

*p5 0.05.

TABLE 5. Explicit and implicit death attitudes among university and funeral students*

University students Funeral students

Mean (SD) Mean (SD) t

DAS-R 41.5a (16.0) 35.2b (15.8) 2.1

IAT anxiety 7.9a (6.4) 7.8 a (7.4) 0.2

IAT valence 9.6a (6.7) 8.9a (8.2) 0.3

IAT denial 4.7a (5.2) 2.1b (6.2) 2.2

*Reading across rows, means with different subscripts differ at the 0.05 level.Higher scores on

implicit death anxiety indicate greater implicit association of death with anxiety.Higher scores on

implicit death valence indicate greater implicit association of death with bad.Higher scores on

implicit death denial indicate greater implicit association of death with other.


less concerned about death or do they under-report their actual death anxiety,

and (3) what is the nature of the relation between implicit and explicit death

attitudes.

How anxious are people about death? Consistent with previous research

(Kastenbaum, 2000; Thorson & Powell, 1994; Wong et al., 1994), participants

in the current study reported on average relatively little death anxiety. Based on

the self-reports of the participants in the present study, one could conclude that

people are not greatly concerned about death. In contrast, the IAT measures of

death attitudes, which presumably measure evaluations at a pre-conscious level

and are more resistant to self-report bias, suggest that participants in the

present study held negative attitudes about death. These IAT results are

inconsistent with the notion asserted by Freud (1913/1953) and Kubler-Ross

(1969), that the unconscious mind cannot conceive of personal mortality

because on average participants evidenced death anxiety even at a preconscious

level.

That participants showed negative implicit but not explicit death attitudes is

consistent with the position advanced by theorists like Becker (1973), Firestone

(1993), and Solomon et al. (1991) that the natural human response is to deny

mortality in order to ward off potentially debilitating anxiety. It should be noted,

however, that there was a wide range of individual variation in implicit death

attitudes. Scores on the IAT measure of death anxiety ranged from 79, indicating

very little implicit association of death words with anxious words, to 34, indicating

a strong implicit association of death words with anxious words. The wide range of

individual differences in IAT death anxiety scores observed in the present study

suggests that, contrary to the proposition of these theorists, unconscious fear of

death may not be invariant because some people may not be particularly

concerned about death even at a pre-conscious level.

Are those in the funeral industry really less anxious about death? The comparison of

funeral and university students revealed that university students reported more

death anxiety than did funeral students, but the two groups did not differ in

their tendency to implicitly associate death more with anxious than calm and

more with bad than good. University students did more strongly associated

death with other people than did funeral students. This finding can be

interpreted as evidence that at the implicit level funeral students are in less

denial about their own mortality than are university students. Although the

extent of association of death with other over self on the IAT was designed to

measure implicit denial of death, it is also possible that it reflects the extent to

which death is self-relevant. Because of their career aspirations, death would be

more self-relevant for funeral than for university students and it may be that it is

this greater self-relevance and not less denial of death that is reflected in the

difference between the two groups.


What is the relation of implicit and explicit death attitudes? Only the IAT measure of

denial (implicitly associating death more with others than self) was significantly

correlated with self-reported death anxiety and even this correlation was small in

magnitude. This discrepancy between implicit and explicit death attitudes is

consistent with previous research (Feifel & Branscomb, 1973; Saboonchi &

Lundh, 1997; Lundh & Radon, 1998). One possible interpretation of this lack of

relation between implicit and explicit measures of death anxiety is based on a

conceptualization of implicit and explicit attitudes as measures of the same

construct at different levels. From this perspective the IAT may serve a lie

detection function because it is less easily biased by self-presentation concerns

than is self-report. Low scores on a death anxiety scale can be a consequence of an

actual lack of death anxiety or of biased reporting in which the individual under-

reports the extent of their death anxiety. For this reason, the relation between

implicit and explicit death anxiety would be obscured.

Alternatively, the lack of correlation between implicit and explicit measures is

consistent with the possibility that individuals can simultaneously hold different

implicit and explicit attitudes (Wilson et al., 2000). Instead of viewing low self-

reported death anxiety as lying or impression management it might reflect

participants lack of knowledge about their negative implicit death attitudes. Such

an interpretation is consistent with the position advocated in Terror Manage-

ment Theory (Pyszczynski et al., 1999) that distal defenses against death anxiety

operate outside conscious awareness. Therefore, when asked to reflect on their

conscious experience of death anxiety people may report little death anxiety.

This may in fact be an under-reporting but one based on a lack of awareness of

the ways in which fear of death motivates behaviour and not one based on

impression management. This argument implies that people are anxious about

death but do not know that they are anxious about death. Such a lack of self-

awareness is possible because distal defenses are activated automatically and

occur outside conscious awareness. As a result reminders of mortality do not

lead to the conscious experience of anxiety because distal defenses are activated

to prevent such anxiety.

The lack of relation between implicit and explicit death attitudes presents a

problem in determining the convergent validity of implicit measures (that is do

they really measure attitudes about death or something else). If convergent

validity for implicit measures cannot be established by comparing them to self-

report measures and there is good reason to question the ability of self-report

measures to adequately assess death anxiety, either because people are motivate

to under-report this anxiety or because they are simply unaware of it, then one

is left with a conundrum. What then is the best strategy for researchers

interested in implicit death anxiety? We suggest that, because attitudes by

definition have a behavioral component, the relation of both implicit and

explicit death attitudes to behavior should be examined. Study 2 examined the

possibility that individual differences in explicit and implicit attitudes about

death might be related to a number of mortality related decisions that people

must make.


Study 2: death attitudes and behaviour among university students

Neimeyer (1997) argues that most studies have failed to examine what are likely

substantial behaviour correlates of death anxiety. Kastenbaum (1996: 119) argues

that rather than focus solely on measuring death anxiety, researchers interested in

individual differences in death constructs should examine how these differences

relate to behaviours such as giving blood or becoming an organ donor. He further

states, ‘‘people who have started to integrate the fact of mortality into their

philosophy of lives might feel more comfortable in relating to those who stand in

near prospect of death’’. By this same logic then, those who have a more accepting

attitude towards death should be more likely to engage in behaviours that are

socially beneficial but often neglected because they make salient thoughts of

mortality. The present study investigated the influence of death attitudes on: (1)

willingness to engage in behaviours which are socially beneficial but often avoided

because they remind one of their own mortality (e.g. donate blood, pre-arrange

their funeral, have a living will) and (2) attitudes towards social issues related to

death such as physician assisted suicide. It was hypothesized that those with more

favourable death constructs, as measured by self-report and the IAT, would be

more willing to give blood and be organ donors, more likely to pre-arrange their

funeral and have a living will, and view physician assisted suicide more favourably.

Method

Participants. Participants were 103 students enrolled in introductory psychology

classes at a large urban university in the USA. Of these participants, 40 identified

their race as European American, 32 as African American, 17 as Asian American,

4 as Latin American, and 5 as other or unspecified. Seventy-nine participants were

women, 21 were men, and three did not report their gender. The mean age of

students was 19.9 (SD=2.8). Participants received partial credit towards the

fulfillment of a class research requirement for their participation.

Materials and procedure. Explicit death anxiety was measured using the 25-item

revised DAS-R and implicit death attitudes were measured using the same three

IAT measures as in Study 1. However, in this study the IAT was administered

using a ‘‘Palm Pilot’’ hand held computer (Dabbs et al., 2003). In this

administration of the IAT, words are presented on the screen in random order

and participants categorize them by tapping the right or left side of the screen.

Whereas the paper pencil version provides a rough estimate of reaction time by the

number of words categorized in a 20 second period, the Palm Pilot version

provides an actual average reaction time in milliseconds. The same category labels

and word stimuli from Study 1 were used in this study.

In addition, participants completed a questionnaire assessing attitudes about

death related topics, in which they reported whether or not they were an organ

donor and had ever given blood. Further they responded to a question about


willingness to pre-arrange one’s own funeral from the Study of American

Attitudes Towards Ritualization and Memorialization (Funeral and Memorial

Informational Council, 2000). In addition, participants read a definition and

sample of a living will and rated on a 7-point Likert scale to what extent they

would like to have a living will where 1 indicated ‘‘not at all’’ and 7 indicated ‘‘very

much.’’ Participants also read a description of Dr. Kevorkian’s Thanatron device,

that allowed patients to self-administer a lethal dose of medication, and rated on a

7-point Likert scale the extent to which they thought the device was humane and

the extent to which they thought the device was disturbing. A measure of approval

of physician-assisted suicide was created by subtracting the disturbing rating from

the humane rating.

Results

As in Study 1, participants reported levels of explicit death anxiety below the

theoretical midpoint on the DAS-R (mean=47.6, SD=18.5)[3] but showed

negative implicit death attitudes on the IAT measures associating death more with

anxious than with calm, more with bad than with good, and more with other

people than with self.[4] Participants were about evenly split in their preference for

making funeral arrangements, with 51 participants endorsing a preference to pre-

arrange their own funeral and 49 participants endorsing a preference to let others

make the funeral arrangements. Thirty-six participants reported having given

blood before and 65 participants reported not having given blood before. Fifty-

seven participants reported that they were organ donors and 44 participants

reported that they were not organ donors. On average participants thought having

a living will was a good idea (mean=4.7, SD=1.7) and slightly approved of

physician assisted suicide (mean=0.6, SD=3.8.) The correlations among scores

on the DAS-R and the three IAT measures are presented in table 6, where it can

be seen that explicit death anxiety was not related to any of the three IAT

measures of implicit death attitudes.

The next set of analyses assessed the extent to which both explicit and implicit

concerns about death were related to individuals’ attitudes about death related

topics such as physician assisted suicide and living wills and to their willingness to

engage in activities that make mortality salient (giving blood, becoming an organ

TABLE 6. Correlations among DAS-R and IAT measures in Study 2

IAT anxiety IAT valence IAT denial DAS-R

IAT anxiety – 0.14 0.09 7 0.18

IAT valence 0.14 – 0.00 7 0.07

IAT denial 0.09 0.00 – 0.00

DAS-R 7 0.18 7 0.07 0.00 –

*p5 0.05.


donor, making funeral arrangements). Correlations of self-reported death anxiety

and IAT death scores with attitudes about death related topics are presented in

table 7, where it can be seen that those participants who desired a living will

tended to score marginally lower on the IAT measure of implicit denial of death,

meaning they tended to associate death less with other people than did those

participants who did not express a desire for a living will. Further, those

participants who approved of physician assisted suicide tended to report

significantly less explicit death anxiety. The means for self-reported death anxiety

and IAT death scores as a function of organ donation, blood donation, and funeral

pre-arrangement are presented in table 8. Organ donors did not differ from non-

TABLE 7. Correlations among self-reported death anxiety, IAT death scores, and attitudes about

death related topics

Wanting a living will Approval of Thanatron

DAS-R 7 0.02 7 0.22*

IAT anxiety 0.14 7 0.10

IAT valence 7 0.15 0.19*

IAT denial 7 0.17* 7 0.12

*p5 0.05.

TABLE 8. Self-reported death anxiety and IAT death scores as a function of organ donation, blood

donation, and funeral pre-arrangement

Organ donation

Yes No t

DAS-R 45.7 49.2 0.9

IAT anxiety 124 159 0.8

IAT valence 267 312 1.1

IAT denial 131 84 1.3

Blood donation

Yes No t

DAS-R 42.7 49.8 1.8*



IAT denial 73 133 1.8*

Pre-arrange funeral

Yes No t

DAS-R 46.0 49.1 0.4



IAT denial 69 156 2.5**

*p5 0.10, **p5 0.05.


organ donors on any of the four measures. While not statistically significant, blood

donors showed marginally less self-reported death anxiety and IAT denial of

mortality than did non-blood donors. Participants who preferred to prearrange

their funeral showed significantly less IAT denial of mortality than did participants

who preferred to let others make the arrangements.

Study 2 discussion

Results of Study 2 again found that whereas participants reported little death

anxiety they showed negative implicit emotional attitudes towards death,

associating it more with anxious than calm, more with bad than good, and more

with other people than self. No relation between self-report and IAT measures of

death attitudes was observed in Study 2. Karpinsky and Hilton (2001) point out

that many studies have failed to show a link between explicit and implicit attitudes.

These authors further suggest that the IATmay not measure personal endorsement

of an attitude but rather the extent of to which a participant has been exposed to

previous pairings of the target concept with either a positive or negative emotion in

their environment. Contrary to this position however is the finding in the present

study that individual differences in implicit death attitudes as measured by the IAT

were related to explicit attitudes about death related topics.

General discussion

The results of the research presented in this paper evidence the utility of using the

IAT as a measure of implicit death attitudes. The findings from both studies

reported here were consistent with previous reports (Feifel & Branscombe, 1973;

Saboonchi & Lundh, 1997; Lundh & Radon, 1998) evidencing a discrepancy

between explicit and implicit death attitudes such that on average implicit attitudes

were more negative than explicit death attitudes. While there are some limitations

to the interpretations of IAT effects (for a review see Fazio & Olson, 2003), it is

nonetheless a powerful tool for assessing attitudes without relying on self-report.

The fact that participants in both studies had implicit attitudes about death that

were more negative than their explicit attitudes indicates that self-report measures

may underestimate the extent of death anxiety and supports the theoretical

proposition that people are motivated to deny death anxiety (Becker, 1973).

The discrepancy between implicit and explicit death attitudes is most striking in

the comparison of funeral and university students presented in Study 1. Taken

together the results of Study 1 indicate that funeral students have less explicit but

not less implicit death anxiety than university students. That funeral student do

not show less implicit death anxiety is suggestive of the possibility that their lower

explicit death anxiety is a function of a response bias, based on impression

management or cognitive dissonance, to under-report the anxiety they actually feel

about death. Alternatively, in the context of Terror Management Theory’s dual

defense model (Pyszczynski et al., 1999), the discrepancy between funeral

students’ implicit and explicit death anxiety could be interpreted as lack of

knowledge about their implicit death anxiety.


The finding in Study 2, that the IAT measure of implicit denial of death was

associated with less interest in having a living will or pre-arranging one’s funeral,

provides some evidence for the validity of implicit measures of death attitudes.

Although there was only a slight relation of implicit and explicit death attitudes to

decisions about mortality related events, this relation was stronger for implicit than

for explicit measures. These implicit measures may be better predictors of

behavioural tendencies related to mortality issues than are traditional self-report

measures. Self-report measures may under-estimate death anxiety andmay be poor

predictors of mortality related behaviours because self-reports of little death

concern may reflect people’s casual recognition that death is inevitable, but not a

deeper evaluation of the personal consequences of this inevitability. Jung (1934: 3)

poetically described this superficial response to death when he wrote, ‘‘We have on

hand for every eventuality one or two suitable banalities . . . such as ‘everyone must

die sometimes’ . . . But when one is alone . . . and sees nothing but . . . the wall of

darkness which will eventually engulf everything you love, posses, wish, strive, and

hope for—then all our profundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable

hiding place’’. The implication of the present research is that future researchers

interested in studying attitudes about death should consider using one of the many

existing methodologies for assessing implicit attitudes such as the IAT (Greenwald

et al., 1998), the emotional Stroop (Williams et al., 1996), the affective Simon

paradigm (De Houwer & Eelen, 1998), or the Go/No-go Association Task (Nosek

& Banaji, 2001b) because these measures might provide a more accurate picture of

the extent to which people are anxious about death and might be better predictors

than questionnaires of people’s behaviours or behavioural intentions in mortality

domains. A related avenue for future research is to examine the possibility that

explicit and implicit death attitudes differentially predict different types of reactions

to death. It seems likely that, in the Terror Management paradigm (Greenberg et

al., 2000), explicit attitudes would better predict proximal defenses and implicit

death attitudes would better predict distal defences.

A serious limitation of the present paper is that the participants were all young

people (the mean age of the three samples was 24.2 years). Consequently, the

conclusions drawn from the present studies should be examined with caution and

may extend only to people in the same age group as the participants tested. It is

quite possible, that the results reported in this paper that implicit attitudes towards

death were very negative and were not strongly related to explicit attitudes were a

consequence of the fact that the young participants had not yet incorporated the

inevitability of death into their worldviews because they were adequately able to

attenuate death anxiety through proximal defenses in which they put off dealing

with death until a future time. Previous research on the relation of age and death

anxiety, using self-report measures, has produced conflicting findings with some

researchers showing an increase in death anxiety with age (McMordie & Kumar,

1984; Schumaker et al., 1991; Suhail & Akram, 2002; Wagner & Lorian, 1984)

and others finding no link between increasing age and increasing levels of death

anxiety (Neimeyer et al., 1988; Pollak, 1979 – 80; Templer et al., 1971; Thorson &

Powell, 1994). The null findings may stem from two different routes to low levels


of explicit death anxiety. Younger participants might report low levels of death

anxiety because they have not yet dealt with the problem of their mortality but

simply respond to thoughts of death with suppression. Older participants might

report the same low levels of death anxiety because they have accepted mortality as

an inevitable and natural part of lie.

Future research is needed to see if the finding of the present paper that implicit

death attitudes are more negative than explicit death attitudes can be generalized

to more diverse and older populations. Because it is unlikely that the young

participants in the current studies would have grappled extensively with their

mortality, their greater implicit death concern need not be taken as evidence of the

universality of death anxiety. A potentially fruitful direction for future research

would be to examine implicit and explicit death attitudes among populations who

are more likely to have confronted death without suppression such as the elderly,

terminally ill patients, health care workers, and combat veterans. If these

populations evidence low explicit and implicit death concern then it leaves open

the possibility that people can react to death without anxiety. Such a finding would

be consistent with the anecdotal evidence that the human encounter with death

need not be characterized by anxiety (Durkheim, 1897/1951; Kaufman, 1976).

While the results of the present paper indicate that on average people hold

negative implicit attitudes about death, some participants were not anxious about

death even when assessed using the IAT. Future research might also assess the

personality characteristics associated with such a lack of implicit death concern

and the ability of experiences, such as taking a death education class, to create less

negative implicit death attitudes.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Dennis Flahive and Patty Hutcheson at Gupton-Jones College

of Funeral Service and Kelly Cate at Georgia State University for their assistance

with data collection, and the late John E. Williams for his work on earlier versions

of this manuscript.

Notes

[1] The reliability of the revised Death Anxiety Scale (DAS-R) in Study 1 was acceptable asevidenced by a Chronbach’s alpha of 0.85.

[2] In Study 1, participants implicitly associated death more with anxious (M=22.6 words) thanwith calm (M=14.8 words), more with bad (M=24.5 words) than with good (M=15.2words) , and more with other people (M=24 words) than with self (M=20.6 words). Thedifference between anxious and calm was statistically significant F (1, 92) = 13.6, p5 0.01.The difference between bad and good was statistically significant F (1, 92) = 12.1, p5 0.01.The difference between other people and self did not reach statistical significance.

[3] The reliability of the revised Death Anxiety Scale (DAS-R) in Study 2 was good as evidencedby a Chronbach’s alpha of 0.90

[4] In Study 2, participants implicitly associated death more with anxious (M=977 ms) than withcalm (M=1,114 ms), more with bad (M=881 ms) than with good (M=1,171 ms), and more


with other people (M=898 ms) than with self (M=1006 ms). The difference between anxiousand calm was statistically significant F (1, 102)= 50.6, p5 0.01. The difference between badand good was statistically significant F (1, 102) = 193.1, p5 0.01. The difference betweenother people and Implicit Association Test self was statistically significant F (1, 102) = 43.9,p5 0.01.

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Biographical notes

Jonathan F. Bassett is a social psychologist with research interests in implicit attitude assessmentand Terror Management Theory. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Georgia StateUniversity in 2002 and is currently assistant professor in the department of psychology atSoutheastern Louisiana University.James M. Dabbs received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1962 in the area ofcommunication and attitude change. He has worked at Yale, the University of Michigan, andGeorgia State University, where he is part of the Social/Cognitive Psychology Program. Hecurrently studies hormones and behavior and works on measures of implicit attitudes.


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Evaluating explicit and implicit death attitudes in funeral and university students