1.5 Focus on Psychological Research – Death Avoidance
Why We Avoid Thinking and Talking About Death
Human beings are the only organisms that can contemplate their non-existence and – more disturbingly – the inevitability of their non-existence. The certainty of our death renders everything we love, hope for, dream about, and care about transient, and – if not insignificant, much less significant and enduring than we might like. Unsurprisingly then, explicit reminders of death and contemplation of our own mortality often result in anxiety and despair. Though we might willingly (and perhaps enthusiastically) seek out fictional depictions of the kinds of death that almost certainly won’t happen to us – e.g., movies about serial killers, apocalyptic zombie shows, and interplanetary warfare – we are notably disinclined to think about our personal demise resulting from likely causes – e.g., a slow and painful cancer death. While this avoidance provides distraction and palliation from distressing emotions, it can leave us unprepared to deal with death adaptively and healthily when it inevitably comes. Moreover, it can rob us of a life lived with urgency and vitality if we seldom consider the reality of our own mortality.
But What If Dying Is Not Quite So Dreadful As We Might Suppose?
In a 2017 investigation, Amelia Goranson and colleagues decided to evaluate this very question. In the first part of their study, they examined blog posts of approximately 600 individuals with terminal illnesses (cancer and ALS) within 3 months of their deaths. These narratives were compared to blog posts of healthy control participants who were asked to imagine that they had a terminal condition and just a few months to live, and to write about their imagined experience with a terminal illness and impending death. Using multiple rating and coding approaches, the blog posts of actual terminally ill individuals were found to be less negative and more positive than posts produced by healthy individuals asked to imagine the dying experience. Interestingly, terminally ill individuals’ posts actually became more positive over time as they approached death.
In the second part of the investigation, researchers gathered death row inmates’ last words (N = 225) as well as poems (N = 188) produced by death row inmates shortly before their death. Once again, control participants who were not anticipating an imminent death were asked to imagine being in that situation (i.e., death by execution within 24 hours) and to try to feel the associated emotions and to write down their thoughts and feelings. Once again, individuals facing their own imminent death tended to produce narratives and reflections that were more positive and less negative in affect than control participants/simulators produced. Overall, this investigation provides fairly compelling evidence that although we imagine that our deaths – even untimely/imminent deaths – will be cause for overwhelming despair and distress, the dying experience may not be as emotionally torturous as we might suppose. Hundreds of individuals across two studies who were within months or days of their death tended to be more positive and less negative in their outlook than was predicted or simulated by control participants. This is consistent with a voluminous psychological research literature on “affective forecasting” that tends to show that we overestimate the severity and pervasiveness of negative emotions for distal, negative life events. To be clear, tragedy and loss will be fraught with sadness and anxiety – and this is an unavoidable fact of life. Still, as this and numerous other studies show, distressing emotions for even very bleak life experiences (e.g., terminal illness) tend not to be as severe, pervasive, and unremitting as we might think. The dying process can indeed allow for closure, acceptance, and positive emotions.
