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Updated: Sep 10, 2025
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Measuring American adults' perceptions about human existence: A cross-sectional study.
Megan Rose Carr LaPorte1,2, Linda Emanuel3,4, Sheldon Solomon5
1Department of Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Palliative & Supportive Care
|August 22, 2025
Summary
Existential maturation, a process prompted by death awareness, lacks direct measures. This study explored mortality salience effects on death thoughts and related psychological constructs.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Existential Psychology
- Mortality Salience Research
Background:
- Awareness of death influences psychological well-being, prompting distress and a maturation process termed existential maturation.
- Currently, quantitative measures for existential maturation are lacking, hindering the study of interventions for existential distress.
- This research investigates the impact of mortality salience on implicit death thoughts and related psychological constructs.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the effect of a mortality salience stimulus on implicit death thoughts over time.
- To explore associations among existing measures of constructs relevant to existential maturation.
- To identify potential indicators for future development of existential maturation measures.
Main Methods:
- A cross-sectional survey was administered to 1,000 US adults representative of urban and rural populations.
- The survey included a mortality salience stimulus (Death Anxiety Beliefs and Behaviors Scale) and measures of death-thought accessibility (DTA), existential isolation, distress, flourishing, transcendence, and attachment.
- Data were analyzed using correlational and multivariate analyses.
Main Results:
- The mortality salience stimulus did not yield expected results on death-thought accessibility (DTA).
- Significant positive correlations were found between existential isolation and distress, and between flourishing and transcendence.
- Attachment styles showed notable associations: avoidant attachment related to lower isolation/distress, while death anxiety linked to anxious/ambivalent attachment.
Conclusions:
- The study highlights significant interrelations between attachment styles and indicators of existential maturation.
- Limitations include a potentially ineffective death reminder or online format affecting DTA results.
- Further research is needed to develop implicit measures for assessing nonconscious components of existential maturation.
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