Religiousness, future time perspective, and death anxiety among adults

The present study examined relations of death anxiety to age, gender, trait anxiety, future time perspective, religiousness, spirituality, and religious doubt. The primary goals of the investigation were to test for a curvilinear relation between religious meaning and death anxiety and to test whether the relations of age and gender with death anxiety were mediated by trait anxiety, future time perspective, religiousness, spirituality, and religious doubt. Participants were adults (18 to 89 years of age, M = 38.28 years, SD = 19.30, 79.1% female, 93.8% Caucasian) who completed the pertinent questionnaires online. Results indicated that there was indeed a curvilinear relation between religious meaning and death anxiety using one measure of death anxiety, the Death Anxiety Scale-Extended (Templer et al., 2006), but not another measure of death anxiety, the Death Anxiety Inventory (Tomas-Sabado & Gomez-Benito, 2005). Additionally, while the relations of age and gender with death anxiety were only partially mediated by the variables of interest, religious belief and religious doubt were unique significant predictors of death anxiety, even with the inclusion of the demographic variables (age and gender) and the personality variable (trait anxiety). The results are discussed in terms of the roles of religious belief and religious doubt in death anxiety and how Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, 1992; Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999) and Terror Management Theory (Greenburg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) might approach those relations.