Death & Dying Final Exam

(1) spiritual, (2) creative, (3) biosocial, (4) natural, and (5) transcendent.

• o Heidegger interpreted guilt as a signal that one was not living authentically; he acknowledge that death was a great source of anxiety but advocated courage to live authentically with that anxiety.
• o Martin, Campbell, and Henry, following in the tradition of Heidegger, describe encounters with personal mortality as the roar of awakening.
• o Wren-Lewis described his brush with death as analogous to having a cataract removed from his brain, because he saw the world and what was important more clearly.

• o Scarcity heuristic – commodities that or rare are perceived as more valuable
• o Value heuristic – commodities that are highly valuable are perceived as scarce
• o King, Hicks, and Abdelkhalik (2009) applied these heuristics to life and death to formulate the following hypotheses:
• * Confrontations with death that prime the scarcity or finiteness of life should increase perceptions of life as valuable.
• * Having people focus on the value of life should increase the perceived scarcity of life as evidenced in greater accessibility of death related thoughts.

• o Recognize the loss
• o React to the separation
• o Recollect the deceased and the relationship
• o Relinquish old attachments to the deceased
• o Readjust adaptively into a new world without forgetting the old
• o Reinvest

The mountain is the place where souls go to pass into their next life. Loved ones go to the mountain to leave items to help the traveling soul have a better next life, and hopefully become a Buddha.

A place of darkness and silence

Some Muslims believe that, after a person dies, “two black-faced, blue-eyed angels named Munkar and Nakir visit the grave and interrogate the deceased about his beliefs and deeds in life.” At a Muslim funeral a mourner may approach a corpse as it is about to be laid in the tomb and whisper instructions for answering these questions.

The idea that a person’s conduct in this life somehow could influence existence in the afterlife contrasted with the predominant view of an indistinct immortality in which all human beings participated regardless of their actions. Eventually, the beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers would be adopted in somewhat altered form during the pre-Christian era, and the relationship between righteous conduct and immortality would be further refined during the early centuries of Christianity.

Like Hinduism, Buddhist doctrine explains that the universe is the product of karma, and the goal is escape from the suffering of samsara, the cycle of births and deaths. The aim is nirvana and it’s described as an “unconditioned state beyond birth and death that is reached after all ignorance and craving have been extinguished and all karma, which is the cause of rebirth, has been dissolved.”

• o The World of Asuras (Tibetan: lha ma yin; Sanskrit: asura) (Demigods, Titans, Fighting Demons)
• o The World of Humans
• o The World of Animals
• o The World of Pretas (hungry ghosts)
• o The World of Hell

• o positively correlated with age
• o negatively correlated with death anxiety
• o positively correlated with purpose in life

• o Mortality salience led to increased desire for symbolic immortality but only among participants with a secure attachment style.
• o The effects of mortality salience on increased cultural worldview defense, as measured by harsher reactions to social transgressors, were dampened by symbolic immortality but only for those with secure attachment style.

Providing participants with purported scientific evidence supporting life after death negated the effects of mortality salience on self-esteem striving and worldview defense; thereby providing further support for the idea that these defenses are activated to prevent anxiety specifically about death

found that mortality salience increased need for literal immortality but not need for historical or physical symbolic immortality.

• o Persistence of signs of “acute” grief
• o Severe, sustained depression
• o Substance abuse or suicidal thoughts
• o Attempts to deny, repress, avoid
• o Attempts to avoid accepting the death

“Working through grief” and “letting go” (attachment theory)

• o Accept the reality of the loss
• o Work through the pain of grief
• o Adjust to a changed environment in which the deceased is missing
• o Emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life and capacity to love others

• o Intuitive: Grief experienced and expressed emotionally - Tends to be associated with women
• o Instrumental: Grief experienced and expressed physically or through mental activity - Tends to be associated with men

Loss-oriented Stressors are those that pertain specifically to the death-loss experience itself. Examples include the disintegration of future plans with the deceased, the ending of the physical relationship with the deceased, and the lack of social support once offered by the deceased. In contrast, restoration-oriented Stressors are those that are secondary (with regard to timing rather than intensity) to the death loss such as the addition of new household chores, decreases in financial resources, and altered communication patterns with friends and family members.

• * Gentle Comforter – powerful but in a quite and comforting way (father time imagery) seen as welcome non-threatening figure
• * Gay Deceiver – attractive, sensuous, sophisticated and stylish imagery similar to modern dress versions of devil a temptress or seductress that attempts to trick one away from life
• * Automaton – vaguely human but nondescript average emotionless like a machine
• ---Among women, the gentle image was most prevalent followed by cold and then grim. Among men the cold image was most prevalent with gentle and grim images occurring about equally often.

• 1. Fear of death – anxiety about death
• 2. Death avoidance – try not to think about death
• 3. Neutral Acceptance – stoic resignation
• 4. Escape Acceptance – view death as release from suffering
• 5. Approach Acceptance – view death as passage to better existence

• * Awareness of the individual
• * Defense of society against untamed nature
• * Belief in the afterlife
• * Belief in the existence of evil

• * The salience of death with illness or old age does not lead directly to death anxiety. Rather anxiety in response to death salience is a function of three factors: the meaningfulness of death, past related regret, and future related regret. These three factors are themselves influenced by beliefs about the self and beliefs about the world.
• * Death salience can trigger a number of coping mechanisms including life review, life planning, identification with one’s culture, self-transcending processes, generative processes, and self-detachment. These coping mechanisms can assuage death anxiety by altering beliefs about the world and about the self which in turn alter the meaningfulness of death, past related regret, and future related regret.