A look back at yet another presumably surprising discovery:
“Personifications of Death and Death Anxiety,” Richard Lonetto, Journal of Personality Assessment, vol. 46, no. 4, 1982. The author, at the University of Guelph, explains:
“University students, graduate nursing students, and funeral service students completed Templer’s Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) and a Death Personification Exercise (DPE). Responses… suggest that: (a) perceptions of death as a gay deceiver were related to a cognitive-affective component of death anxiety; while images of death as a gentle comforter or macabre figure were related to an awareness of the passage of time; and (b) reactions to death and descriptions of the activities of death were associated with concern about physical alterations”