THE DEATH FANTASY SCALE - A MEASURE BASED ON METAPHORS OF ONES PERSONAL DEATH

Conventional self-report inventories measuring attitudes toward death have been criticized on the grounds that they fail to tap important un conscious processes related to death anxieties and are contaminated by broad personality dispositions such as neuroticism. In this study, us ing Australian volunteers as subjects, we investigated a measure devis ed by Feifel and Nagy (1981) to tap death-related attitudes at a fanta sy level. The scale contained two subscales: Positive Death Metaphors and Negative Death Metaphors, both of which were internally consistent and relatively uncorrelated with a general measure of neuroticism. Th e measure shows potential as a tool for investigating aspects of attit udes toward death and dying.