Identity and death anxiety

Sixty-three male Caucasian undergraduates were involved in a study examining possible relationships between death anxiety and Erikson's concept of ego identity. Participants were administered Marcia's Ego Identity Status Interview and Templar's Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) in counterbalanced order. A one-way analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect of ego identity status on DAS scores. One identity status, moratorium, was associated with significantly higher DAS scores than the other three statuses. Diffusion, foreclosure, and achievement statuses did not significantly differ on DAS scores.     

Linguistic correlates of social anxiety disorder

The goal of this study was to examine the linguistic correlates of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Twenty-four individuals with SAD (8 of them with a generalised subtype) and 21 non-anxious controls were asked to give speeches in front of an audience. The transcribed speeches were examined for the frequency of negations, I-statements, we-statements, negative emotion words, and positive emotion words. During their speech, individuals with either SAD subtype used positive emotion words more often than controls. No significant differences were observed in the other linguistic categories. These results are discussed in the context of evolutionary and cognitive perspectives of SAD.     

Existential perspectives on death anxiety

Construct validity is the hallmark of Templer's Death Anxiety Scale (1970), which has generated a healthy stream of research of paramount importance in the USA and all over the world. This paper contends that scores on this scale provide valuable scientific knowledge on group norms. To expand the concept of death anxiety it is necessary to supplement empirical with qualitative research. Persons with the same scores may show qualitatively different fears of death, and vice versa. Total reliance on empirical scales may not disclose the depth of bipolar meaning in a "life-death anxiety." Templer's scale is a mixture of fears, phobias, and obsessions with thoughts of illness, cancer, heart disease, and wars. A bipolar "life-death anxiety" continuum requires phenomenology to reach beyond the 15 items to the process of "experiencing." The scale addresses "thoughts" about the death of others even though its items are cast in the first person singular. This provides group norms of a "cognitive-affective" construct, with limited generality cross-culturally. Means do not disclose fully meaningful comparisons between persons or cultures. Death Anxiety as an existential anticipatory mode of "being-in-the-world" is embedded in a personal/genetic/cultural matrix that may vary individually and culturally.     

The influence of religion on death anxiety and death acceptance

Parishioners (n?=?130) of an Episcopal church in New York City participated in a survey to explore the relationship between the religiosity, death acceptance, and death anxiety. Among the four different types of religiosity measured by the Rohrbaugh and Jessor scale, theological religiosity was the only one to have a significant effect on death acceptance and death anxiety. Belief in God’s existence (r?=??0.27), and belief in the afterlife (r?=??0.25) were both negatively correlated with death anxiety (p?<?0.01), and positively correlated with death acceptance (respectively, r?=?0.21 and r?=?0.22, p?<?0.05). The effects remained significant even after controlling for a number of demographic variables using multiple regression procedures. Being a woman was the only demographic variable that was significantly correlated with greater anxiety about death. On average, women displayed significantly higher levels of death anxiety (M?=?8.1, SD?=?2.8) than men (M?=?6.2, SD?=?2.9).     

Electrodermal correlates of extraversion, trait anxiety and schitophrenisrn

Abstract.— Recording skin resistance in 34 young women it was found that extraverted subjects showed less responsiveness to moderate intensity stimuli, whereas high neuroticism or anxiety prone subjects showed more spontaneous fluctuations and better electrodermal conditioning when conditioned responses were scored relative to unconditioned responses. Further, the subjects were rated for 'schizophrenism' according to an inventory devised by the authors. The high schizophrenism subjects behaved electrodermally very much like the pre-schizophrenic sample in Mednick and Schulsinger's prospective study of schizophrenia; they exhibited faster recovery, greater response amplitude to aversive stimuli and faster initial habituation to these stimuli.     

Familial correlates of social anxiety in children and adolescents

Retrospective studies suggest a relationship between parental rearing practices and social phobia. The present study investigated whether socially anxious children perceive their current parental rearing as rejecting, overprotective, and lacking emotional warmth, and as emphasizing the importance of other's opinion, and de-emphasizing social initiatives and family sociability. Furthermore, we examined whether parents of socially anxious children report to rely on such rearing practices, and suffer themselves from social fears. A regression analysis as well as extreme group comparisons were applied. Little support was found for the presumed role of the assessed family rearing aspects in the development of social anxiety in children. Solely family sociability (children's and mothers' report) and children's perception of overprotection of the mother predicted social anxiety in the regression analysis. Given the influence of the mentioned rearing practices, social anxiety of the mother still significantly predicted social anxiety of the child. In the extreme group comparisons, differences in the expected direction were found between socially anxious and normal children on parental rejection, emotional warmth, and family sociability. However, the lack of differences between socially anxious and clinical control children suggests that these variables do not form a specific pathway to social fears.     

Exploring linguistic correlates of social anxiety in romantic stories

The current study used computerized linguistic analysis of stories about either going on a date or taking a walk down a street to examine linguistic correlates of social anxiety in a sample of undergraduate students. In general, linguistic analysis revealed associations of social anxiety with several linguistic variables, including negative emotion, affect, and anxiety words. Participants higher in social anxiety wrote fewer affect words. The relationship between social anxiety and anxiety words depended on gender, whereas the relationship between social anxiety and negative emotion words depended on both gender and the nature of primes (supraliminal vs. subliminal) received. Overall, our findings highlight the potential utility and benefits of using linguistic analysis as another source of information about how individuals higher in social anxiety process romantic stimuli.     

Attitudes toward physician-assisted suicide and death anxiety

A scale to measure approval of physician-assisted suicide was devised. Scores on the scale were uncorrelated to death anxiety in a sample of 168 students.