Attachment to God as a predictor of death distress among Muslims
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Attachment to God as a predictor of death distress among Muslims Ali Mohammadzadeh 1
&
Mohammad Oraki 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Death anxiety, death obsession and death depression are the three dimensions of death distress, which can be influenced by religious variables. The current study examines whether attachment to God can predict death distress in Muslims. Sample data for the study were collected from 346 participants. The participants completed the Death Anxiety Scale, the Death Obsession Scale, the Death Depression Scale, and the Attachment to God Inventory. Data were analyzed using factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. The results of principal component analysis showed that death anxiety, death obsession and death depression were separate factors of death distress. The results confirmed that anxious attachment to God was a significant predictor of death anxiety, death obsession and death depression (p < 0.001). Consistent with previous studies and attachment theory, this finding emphasized the role of insecure attachment to God in increasing death distress and also in possible consequent psychopathology. Keywords Death distress . Death anxiety . Death obsession . Death depression . Attachment to god
Introduction The documented research emphasizes the awareness of mortality and the fear of death as constituents of the human condition (Eshbaugh and Henninger 2013; Furer and Walker 2008). Although the end-of-life perception is an important part of it, there are considerable differences in human attitudes toward death. Such attitudes are debatable from two adaptive and maladaptive perspectives. While death is considered as the natural end of life in adaptive attitudes, maladaptive attitudes recognize death as threatening and incomprehensible. Maladaptive attitudes may lead to pathological reactions as well as death distress (Neimeyer, Wittkowski & Moser, 2004). Studies on the concept of death-related maladaptive attitudes initially were started in the 1980’s in the field of death anxiety (Kastenbaum 2000). Abdel-khalek and Tomas-Sabado (2005) defined death anxiety as fear of dying oneself and others. In other words, death anxiety entails the prediction of one’s own death and fear of dying the most important people of an individual. The second wave of death studies occurred in the mid-1990’s.
* Ali Mohammadzadeh [email protected] Mohammad Oraki [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran
Templer et al. (1990) introduced the concept of death depression at the conceptual and psychological levels. They defined this concept as depressive components in response to the idea of death within six dimensions namely death despair, death loneliness, death dread, death sadness, death depression and death finality. Finally, the concept of Bdeath obsession^ was introduced by Abdel-khalek (1998). This concept was defined as preoccupations, impulses and persistent ideas about death. Death rumination, deat
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