Death anxiety and death denial: Nigerian and Australian students' metaphors of personal death.
Ninety-two Nigerian students and 114 Australian students completed Templer's (1970) Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) and Feifel and Nagy's (1981) death fantasy measure of positive and negative death metaphors. They were each also asked to write his or her own metaphor of personal death. Results of the DAS showed that the two groups did not differ significantly on the level of conscious death anxiety, but Nigerian students' scores were significantly higher on both positive and negative personal death metaphors scales. Also, significantly more Nigerian students wrote personal metaphors of their own and more often used a neutral metaphor to describe their personal death. Australian students more often used a positive or a negative metaphor. The Nigerian students thus evidenced less death denial than the Australian students did.
McLennan
J
J
Psychology Department, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
Akande
A
A
Bates
G W
GW
D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety; D001293:Attitude to Death; D001315:Australia; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003717:Denial, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009549:Nigeria; D012660:Semantics; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*