A Qualitative Study of How Hospice Workers Cope With Their Level of Exposure to Death.

OBJECTIVE: To identify whether hospice workers hold unique and theoretically-informative perspectives about death, especially as they relate to terror management processes. METHOD: Twelve hospice workers from two hospices in Tucson, Arizona, United States, participated in semi-structured interviews. Interview and analytic practices were guided by Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). RESULTS: Three categories were identified in relation to death attitudes: effects of chronic confrontation with death; reasons for working in hospice; and perceptions of death in others. CONCLUSIONS: Two theoretically informative trends appeared. First, hospice workers largely manage death anxiety as identified by existing literature with the notable exception that hospice workers overall seem to integrate death and dying into their worldviews as a meaningful category, as opposed to avoiding thinking about death. Second, even among those regularly exposed to death, there seems to be a range across participants on a continuum from avoiding to confronting the topic of death.

The role of perceived level of threat, reactance proneness, political orientation, and coronavirus salience on health behavior intentions.

OBJECTIVE: This pre-registered study was designed to test whether reminders of death and coronavirus would have similar or different effects on health behavior intentions concerning COVID-19 (e.g., mask wearing, social distancing) and whether the type of framing of these behaviors would moderate these effects. DESIGN: The study utilized a 3 (threat: mortality salience vs. coronavirus reminder vs. control topic) x 3 (framing: autonomy-supportive vs. controlled vs. neutral) design. Measures of perceived threat of COVID-19, reactance proneness, and political orientation were included as individual differences. RESULTS: Although the interaction between threat and framing conditions was not significant, the data revealed that (1) lower perceived threat of COVID-19 was associated with lower health behavior intentions to reduce the spread of the virus; (2) after an induction to express their thoughts and feelings about COVID-19, participants with low perceived threat of COVID-19 significantly increased their health intentions; (3) perceived threat of COVID-19 moderated the relationship between reactance proneness and health intentions, such that those high in reactance proneness reported lower intentions unless they had high perceptions of threat; and (4) politically conservative participants reported lower intentions to engage in healthy behaviors, and this relationship was mediated by their lower perceived threat of COVID-19.

Loss and lastingness? Further exploring the relationship between the death of a close other, belief in an everlasting soul, and terror management processes.

This research explored the relationship between the death of a close other (DOCO) and terror management processes. In Study 1 (n = 810), university students who experienced DOCO (vs. not) reported higher university and American identification; greater self-esteem and meaning in life; lower death-thought accessibility; greater "death-as-passage" representations; and higher belief in an everlasting soul. We pre-registered Study 2 (n = 497) as an attempt to replicate these findings; although the patterns of means were consistent with Study 1, the tests did not reach statistical significance. However, analyses on the merged data (N = 1,307) supported the present theoretical analysis.