How you think about death affects how you behave in life. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers had people either think about death in the abstract or in a specific, personal way and found that people who thought specifically about their own death were more likely to demonstrate concern for society by donating blood. Laura E.R. Blackie, a Ph.D. student at the University of Essex, and her advisor, Philip J. Cozzolino, recruited 90 people in a British town center. Some were asked to respond to general questions about death -- such as their thoughts and feelings about death and what they think happens to them if they die. Others were asked to imagine dying in an apartment fire and then asked four questions about how they thought they would deal with the experience and how they thought their family would react. A control group thought about dental pain.
