Nothing Is Certain Except Taxes and the Other Thing: Searching for Death Anxiety in a Large Online Sample

Abstract

Philosophical and psychological literature has suggested that death anxiety has a profound impact on people’s lives and is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Such claims motivated us to examine how people express their emotions and attitudes toward death in short free-text responses. We explored a qualitative dataset where 803 Americans stated their thoughts about either death or physical pain (toothache). Comparing these, we found that death prompts caused the expression of less negative affect and more positive affect than toothache prompts. The reactions to death were quite diverse and did not appear to be dominated by existential anxiety. We discuss whether this pattern may be due to psychological defense against death causing negative emotions, or whether the pattern reveals a “true” preference for contemplating death rather than toothache. The article serves as a companion for an open dataset, to allow other researchers to explore and reuse it.