The Death Fantasy Scale: A Measure Based on Metaphors of One's Personal Death

Abstract

Conventional self-report inventories measuring attitudes toward death have been criticized on the grounds that they fail to tap important unconscious processes related to death anxieties and are contaminated by broad personality dispositions such as neuroticism. In this study, using Australian volunteers as subjects, we investigated a measure devised by Feifel and Nagy (1981) to tap death-related attitudes at a fantasy level. The scale contained two subscales: Positive Death Metaphors and Negative Death Metaphors, both of which were internally consistent and relatively uncorrelated with a general measure of neuroticism. The measure shows potential as a tool for investigating aspects of attitudes toward death and dying.