Premium
CHILDREN'S PERCEPTION OF DEATH IN HUMANS AND ANIMALS AS A FUNCTION OF AGE, ANXIETY AND COGNITIVE ABILITY
Author(s) -
Orbach Israel,
Gross Yigal,
Glaubman Hananyah,
Berman Devora
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
journal of child psychology and psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.652
H-Index - 211
eISSN - 1469-7610
pISSN - 0021-9630
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1985.tb01946.x
Subject(s) - psychology , anxiety , death anxiety , cognition , developmental psychology , clinical psychology , perception , psychiatry , neuroscience
— This study investigated the impact of age, cognitive level and anxiety level on children's conception of death in humans and animals. Children from three age groups (6–7; 8–9; 10–11) were divided into high and low anxiety levels and high and low cognitive abilities. Then, the children were administered two questionnaires on human and animal death. The findings show that there was a main effect of age, anxiety and cognition on the conception of both animal and human death. Human death scores were higher than animal death scores. The interactions indicate that anxiety has a stronger impact on cognitively high subjects than on cognitively low subjects and that cognition affects the animal death concept more than the human death concept.