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1、Childrens and adults understanding of death:Cognitive,parental,and experiential influencesGeorgia Panagiotakia,Michelle Hopkinsb,Gavin Nobesc,Emma Wardd,Debra GriffithscaDepartment of Medicine,Norwich Medical School,University of East Anglia,Norwich NR4 7TJ,UKbSussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
2、,West Sussex BN13 3EP,UKcSchool of Psychology,University of East Anglia,Norwich NR4 7TJ,UKdSchool of Social Work,University of East Anglia,Norwich NR4 7TJ,UKa r t i c l ei n f oArticle history:Received 5 October 2016Revised 28 June 2017Keywords:Understanding of deathCoexistent thinkingParental influ
3、encesReligionAfterlife beliefsConceptual developmenta b s t r a c tThis study explored the development of understanding of death ina sample of 4-to 11-year-old British children and adults(N=136).It also investigated four sets of possible influences on this develop-ment:parents religion and spiritual
4、 beliefs,cognitive ability,socioeconomicstatus,andexperienceofillnessanddeath.Participants were interviewed using the death concept”interviewthat explores understanding of the subcomponents of inevitability,universality,irreversibility,cessation,and causality of death.Children understood key aspects
5、 of death from as early as 4 or5 years,and with age their explanations of inevitability,universal-ity,and causality became increasingly biological.Understanding ofirreversibility and the cessation of mental and physical processesalso emerged during early childhood,but by 10 years many chil-drens exp
6、lanations reflected not an improved biological under-standing but rather the coexistence of apparently contradictorybiological and supernatural ideasreligious,spiritual,or meta-physical.Evidence for these coexistent beliefs was more prevalentin older children than in younger children and was associa
7、ted withtheir parents religious and spiritual beliefs.Socioeconomic statuswas partly related to childrens biological ideas,whereas cognitiveability and experience of illness and death played less importantroles.There was no evidence for coexistent thinking among adults,http:/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jec
8、p.2017.07.0140022-0965/Crown Copyright?2017 Published by Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved.Corresponding author.E-mail address:g.panagiotakiuea.ac.uk(G.Panagiotaki).Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 166(2018)96115Contents lists available at ScienceDirectJournal of Experimental ChildPsychologyj
9、ournal homepage: a clear distinction between biological explanations aboutdeath and supernatural explanations about the afterlife.Crown Copyright?2017 Published by Elsevier Inc.All rightsreserved.IntroductionUnderstanding death is a complex and emotional process that involves the recognition of five
10、 keybiological factsthe five death subcomponents,namely that(a)all humans will die one day(inevitability),(b)death applies to all living entities(universality),(c)death is permanent(irreversibil-ity),(d)with death all physical and psychological functions stop(cessation),and(e)death is caused bythe b
11、reakdown of bodily processes(causality)(Jaakkola&Slaughter,2002;Speece&Brent,1984).Understanding of these subcomponents is acquired at different times and at different rates.Chil-dren as young as 5 years grasp the ideas that death is inevitable and irreversible,but most do not beginto understand uni
12、versality and cessation until around 6 or 7 years(Lazar&Torney-Purta,1991;Nguyen&Gelman,2002;Panagiotaki,Nobes,Ashraf,&Aubby,2015;Slaughter&Griffiths,2007;Slaughter&Lyons,2003).There is also evidence that children understand the cessation of physicalprocesses(i.e.,the body stops working)before they
13、grasp the idea that mental processes,such asthoughts and emotions,also come to an end with death(Bering&Bjorklund,2004;Bering,Hernandez Blasi,&Bjorklund,2005;Misailidi&Kornilaki,2015).Causality is a more abstract notionand usually the last to be acquired because it involves the understanding of comp
14、lex processes leadingto the bodys breakdown(Slaughter&Griffiths,2007).Children understand causality when thinkingabout plants as early as 4 years(e.g.,Nguyen&Gelman,2002),but causality of human death is typ-ically not understood until as late as 810 years(Panagiotaki et al.,2015;Slaughter&Griffiths,
15、2007).Learning about death occurs when children are exposed to biological facts about its inevitability,itsirreversibility,and the cessation of physical and psychological processes.During this process,childrenalso encounter different supernatural”beliefsembedded in religious traditions and culturest
16、hatendorse the notions of the afterlife and spiritual world(Legare,Evans,Rosengren,&Harris,2012).Examples include beliefs that the deceased continue to feel,think,and interact with the living;thatthe spirit or soul of the dead continues to exist in a different realm;and that the dead person is judge
17、dand either enjoys heaven and eternal life with God or punishment in hell.These supernatural beliefshave previously been defined as immature ways of thinking about death that contradict the superiornatural”explanations and are eventually replaced by them(Norris&Inglehart,2004;Piaget,1928;Preston&Epl
18、ey,2009).This view accepts natural explanations as the only mature way of understand-ing and explaining the subcomponents of death.Recent evidence,however,suggests that natural and supernatural beliefs about unobservable phe-nomena,such as life,death,and the afterlife(Harris&Gimenez,2005;Watson-Jone
19、s,Busch,Harris,&Legare,2017)but also illness(Busch,Watson-Jones,&Legare,2017;Legare&Gelman,2009)and evo-lution(Evans&Lane,2011;Evans,Legare,&Rosengren,2011;Tenenbaum&Hohenstein,2016),arenot necessarily incompatible but often coexist in the same mind to explain the same phenomena(Gelman&Legare,2011).
20、For example,children may recognize that dead people cannot move orsee because their bodies have stopped working but at the same time may believe that they dreamor miss their childrena belief consistent with the notion that certain psychological processes persistafter death.There is also evidence tha
21、t this coexistence becomes more prevalent as children growolder and begin to entertain alternative ideas about death(Harris,2011).Even adultsparticularlythose from religious and diverse cultural contextsoften endorse afterlife beliefs when reasoningabout death(Lane,Zhu,Evans,&Wellman,2016;Rosengren,
22、Gutirrez,&Schein,2014b;Watson-Jones,Busch,&Legare,2015).A number of studies support this account.Harris and Gimenez(2005)asked 7-and 8-year-old and10-to 12-year-old Spanish children whether certain biological and psychological processes persistG.Panagiotaki et al./Journal of Experimental Child Psych
23、ology 166(2018)9611597after death.They found that 7-and 8-year-olds gave biological explanations that supported the ces-sation of all processes,whereas many 10-to 12-year-olds said that certain processes persist and gavesupernatural justifications with references to God,the soul,and heaven.Rosengren
24、 et al.(2014b)reported that although 6-year-old Americans understood the biological facts about inevitability,irre-versibility,cessation,and causality of death,they also relied on religious and metaphysical explana-tions about the afterlife.These coexistent explanatory systems were present from 4 ye
25、ars,but theirprevalence increased with age.Similarly,Lane et al.(2016)reported that 4-year-old Americansbelieved that physical and mental functions in people and animals persist after death.By 6 years,thesebeliefs became less common and children reasoned about death in biological termsonly to become
26、more prevalent again from 7 years.This dualistic or coexistent reasoning has been evident in studies with participants from the UnitedStates and Spain,where Christian beliefs prevail and children are exposed to supernatural ideas aboutdeath(Bering,2002;Bering&Bjorklund,2004;Harris&Gimenez,2005;Lane
27、et al.,2016).Studieshave also been conducted in diverse cultures such as in Madagascar,where strong beliefs in the pres-ence of dead ancestors among the living exist(Astuti&Harris,2008),and in Tanna,Vanatu,a Melane-sian archipelago,where metaphysical and religious explanations of death are deeply em
28、bedded inlocal beliefs and practices(Busch et al.,2017;Watson-Jones et al.,2017).Despite some degree of vari-ation,these studies provide cross-cultural evidence that(a)children,and often adults,are more likelyto believe in the continuation of psychological processes such as thinking and dreaming tha
29、n in thecontinuation of biological processes,(b)natural(biological)and supernatural(religious or spiritual)explanations about aspects of death often coexist in childrens and adults minds without any apparenttension”between the two,and(c)this coexistence does not reflect immature thinking that is eve
30、n-tually replaced by biological facts but rather tends to emerge after the biological understanding ofdeath has been acquired(Astuti&Harris,2008;Watson-Jones et al.,2017).According to Lane et al.(2016),however,data from such religiously saturated”cultures,wherereligious and metaphysical beliefs are
31、strongly embedded in peoples thinking,leave open the possi-bility that children from more secular backgrounds do not hold coexistent beliefs about death to thesame degree.When Lane et pared explanations of death given by religious American and sec-ular Chinese 4-to 12-year-olds,they found that the C
32、hinese believed in the persistence of psycholog-ical processes after death much less than their American peers.The contrast in culturally transmittedknowledge about death between China,with its recent history of religious intolerance,and America,where religion is widely practiced,may explain why the
33、 Chinese relied less on supernatural explana-tions of death than the Americans.It is possible,therefore,that the evidence for supernatural andcoexistent beliefs about death is more prevalent in children from religious cultures than in those fromless religious and secular backgrounds.The current stud
34、yReligion,afterlife beliefs,and death understandingThis study explored the understanding of death among a sample of 4-to 11-year-old children andadults in Britain,where there has been relatively little research in this area(Hopkins,2014).LikeChina,Britain is less religiously saturated than the Unite
35、d States or Spain,with fewer people consid-ering themselves religious.Approximately 77%of Americans,73%of Spanish,but only 48%of Britishconsider themselves religious,and 72%of Americans versus 49%of British believe in some form ofafterlife(Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas,2016;National Centre
36、for Social Research,2015;Pew Research Center,2015).Despite these differences,many British children come from religious fam-ilies and attend religious schools.There is,therefore,a wide range of religiosity in Britainfromstrongly held religious and metaphysical beliefs,as is typical in countries such
37、as the United Statesand Spain,to the more secular,as is more typical in China.Previous research with American,Spanish,and Israeli children indicates that religiosity in the fam-ily or in childrens educational settings can shape many of their explanations of death(Bering et al.,2005;Candy-Gibbs,Sharp
38、,&Petrun,1985;Florian&Kravetz,1985;Harris&Gimenez,2005;Rosengren et al.,2014b).For example,children from religious backgrounds often believe that biolog-ical and psychological processes continue after death.They also tend to give religious explanations98G.Panagiotaki et al./Journal of Experimental C
39、hild Psychology 166(2018)96115about the irreversibility of death and make references to God or heaven.The range of religiosity in Bri-tish families allows further investigation of these influences of familial background on childrensbeliefs about death and,more specifically,of Lane et al.s(2016)sugge
40、stion that coexistent thinkingis more prevalent in children from religious families.To test these proposals,this study measured bothchildrens beliefs about death and their parents religiosity.In addition,regardless of their religion,weasked parents what they believed about the afterlife.Adults and d
41、eath understandingAnother innovation of this study concerns the inclusion of a sample of adults who were tested withthe same questions as children.With some recent exceptions(e.g.,Lane et al.,2016;Watson-Joneset al.,2015,2017),most research in this field has concentrated on childrens reasoning about
42、 death.Yet,as Coley(2000)argued,testing adults with childrens tasks has several advantages,not least thatto characterize the process of conceptual development,we need to understand the adult model,themodal end state of development in a given society”(p.82).Following Watson-Jones et al.s(2017)suggest
43、ion that,at least among the more religious or traditional cultures that have been studied pre-viously,many adults hold a dual conception of deathdeath as a biological endpoint and death as thebeginning of an afterlifethis study tested whether such coexistent thinking is also evident in Britishadults
44、 explanations.Other possible influences on childrens beliefs about death,such as cognitive ability and previousexperience of illness and death,have also been explored.However,there are some inconsistencies inthe findings from research in these areas.Cognitive ability and death understandingSome stud
45、ies reveal associations between childrens understanding of death and verbal ability(Jenkins&Cavanaugh,1986)or performance in the Piagetian tasks of seriation,conservation,and clas-sification(e.g.,Cotton&Range,1990;Hunter&Smith,2008;Reilly et al.,1983).Others report no rela-tionship between cognitive
46、 ability and death understanding(Mahon,Goldberg,&Washington,1999;Orbache,Weiner,Har-Even,&Eshel,1995).Discrepancies in these findings might be explained by dif-ferences in the designs and assessment measures used(Hopkins,2014).To gain a better understanding of the relationship between cognitive abil
47、ity and childrens deathunderstandingindependent of agewe tested 4-and 5-year-olds with the Wechsler Preschool andPrimary Scale of Intelligence(WPPSI-III;Wechsler,2003)and tested 6-to 11-year-olds with theWechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence(WASI-II;Wechsler&Hsiao-Pin,2011).We used thesewell-va
48、lidated measures to avoid the limitations of traditional Piagetian tasks that have been criti-cized for their lack of validity and reliability and for largely ignoring individual differences(Fontana,1995;Hopkins,2014).These measures allowed us to explore the influence of verbal compre-hension and pe
49、rceptual reasoningboth subtests of the WPPSI-IIIon childrens reasoning aboutdeath.Socioeconomic status and death understandingAlthough it is recognized that family socioeconomic status is a key factor associated with childrenscognitive development(Hackman&Farah,2009),few studies have explored its re
50、lationship with thedevelopment of childrens understanding of death(Hopkins,2014).According to some early research,urban children from low-socioeconomic backgrounds may have a less well-developed understandingof aspects of death than their peers from wealthier backgrounds(Atwood,1984;Tallmer,Formanek