The Relationship Between Anxiety About Aging and Attitudes About Death

Societal attitudes about aging and about death tend to be negative. Those attitudes result in negative stereotypes which in turn perpetuate the negative views of aging and death that are held by individuals of all ages. The present study was designed to assess fears of aging and fears of death in a sample of college students. A further goal of the study was to determine if the two measures were correlated. As hypothesized, fear of aging was positively correlated with fear of death. Participants with higher levels of aging anxiety also tended to have higher levels of death anxiety. The results have implications for researchers and practitioners interested in assessing or moderating aging and death fears.