Abstract:
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Since afterlife beliefs have often been described as responses to the fear of dying, one might expect to find those with more concrete afterlife beliefs, especially those adhering to traditional religious orthodoxy, to demonstrate lower levels of mortality anxiety. In this poster, we present the results of our comparison of data from a wide-ranging survey of beliefs in and experiences with death, dying, and the afterlife in a Jewish population as they relate to afterlife belief and death anxiety. Ultimately, we find very few significant correlations between any of the afterlife beliefs despite the expectedly clear correlations between specific beliefs and denominations. Therefore, we conclude that in this representative Jewish population, afterlife beliefs of any kind have little to no impact on mortality anxiety.
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