Investigation of personal factors affecting existential anxiety: A model testing study
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Investigation of personal factors affecting existential anxiety: A model testing study Gözde Evram 1
&
Ayhan Çakici Eş 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study aims to test a theoretical model which was developed based on the related literature for explaining certain variables that may influence existential anxiety of university students. The main hypothesis of the study is that affective and cognitive factors (death anxiety, the meaning of life, life satisfaction, positive affect and depression) may be related to existential anxiety. The study group consisted of 1230 university students (707 female and 523 male participants) enrolled in different universities. The Existential Concerns Questionnaire, Death Anxiety Scale, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and the Beck Depression Inventory were used to collect the data. The statistical data were analyzed using IBM AMOS 21.0 software. As a result of the statistical analysis of the data, goodness of fit indices (NFI, CFI and GFI) excluding χ2 /sd and RMSEA value show that the model has a perfect fit and the AGFI value is acceptable. The analysis results of the structural equation model show whether existential anxiety significantly predicts the death anxiety. The death anxiety and the meaning of life predicted positive affect significantly and positively. Furthermore, the meaning of life and the death anxiety predicted life satisfaction significantly and positively. Positive affect predicted life satisfaction positively; and positive affect and life satisfaction predicted subjective well-being significantly and positively. Keywords Existential anxiety . Death anxiety . Meaning of life . Subjective well-being . Depression
Introduction Existential anxiety, with its origin from the philosophical traditions of great philosophers like Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers and Heidegger, was adopted by many psychologists and psychiatrists like Rollo May, Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom (Corey 2008). Existentialists consider the concept of anxiety as one of the most important situations related to human nature. At the same time, they distinguished between neurotic anxiety and existential anxiety, the state of anxiety experienced by an ordinary person in their daily life. According to existentialists, existential anxiety is a very basic and universal situation in human life and is experienced only by a very rare number of people in its pure state (Kıraç 2007). Existential anxiety include concerns in relation to fear of death, the experience of meaninglessness, fear of making wrong life choices, and feeling disconnected to other people (Yalom 2001).
* Gözde Evram [email protected] 1
Guidance and Psychological Counselling Department, Near East University, Nicosia, Cyprus
In psychology, death became a research topic in the 1950s (Strack 2003). Research on death and conceptions relating to death expanded, especially with the increase in global threats like
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