ABSTRACT
The psychological encounter with death, the overwhelming experience of death anxiety, and the cognitive and behavioral consequences of this terrifying and paralyzing experience have fascinated social scientists for many decades. In psychology, two theoretical and research trends have attempted to examine and delineate human reactions to the psychological encounter with death. One trend, which emerged from thanatos psychology, mainly focuses on the assessment of a person’s fear of death and the way cultural, personal, and contextual factors
affect the intensity of this fear (e.g., Kastenbaum, 2000; Neimeyer, 1988, 1994). The other trend, which emerged from social psychology, mainly focuses on the cognitive and behavioral repercussions of the encounter with death and the way people cope with death-related concerns (e.g., Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991). Although these two trends initially conceptualized death-related concerns in a unidimensional manner, the work of Victor Florian has moved the field to the recognition that fear of death is a complex, multidimensional construct and that people differ not only in the intensity of this fear but also in the meanings they attach to death and the concerns that characterize their experience and reactions to the encounter with death. In particular, Victor Florian has developed and empirically validated a multifaceted theoretical framework for assessing and analyzing the multidimensional meanings, manifestations, and psychological consequences of the fear of personal death.
