Children’s and adults’ understanding of death: Cognitive, parental, and experiential influences

Panagiotaki, Georgia ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2975-1196, Hopkins, Michelle, Nobes, Gavin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1991-1130, Ward, Emma ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7579-3215 and Griffiths, Debra (2018) Children’s and adults’ understanding of death: Cognitive, parental, and experiential influences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 166. pp. 96-115. ISSN 0022-0965

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Abstract

This study explored the development of understanding of death in a sample of 4- to 11-year-old British children and adults (N = 136). It also investigated four sets of possible influences on this development: parents’ religion and spiritual beliefs, cognitive ability, socioeconomic status, and experience of illness and death. Participants were interviewed using the “death concept” interview that explores understanding of the subcomponents of inevitability, universality, irreversibility, cessation, and causality of death. Children understood key aspects of death from as early as 4 or 5 years, and with age their explanations of inevitability, universality, and causality became increasingly biological. Understanding of irreversibility and the cessation of mental and physical processes also emerged during early childhood, but by 10 years many children’s explanations reflected not an improved biological understanding but rather the coexistence of apparently contradictory biological and supernatural ideas—religious, spiritual, or metaphysical. Evidence for these coexistent beliefs was more prevalent in older children than in younger children and was associated with their parents’ religious and spiritual beliefs. Socioeconomic status was partly related to children’s biological ideas, whereas cognitive ability and experience of illness and death played less important roles. There was no evidence for coexistent thinking among adults, only a clear distinction between biological explanations about death and supernatural explanations about the afterlife.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	understanding of death,coexistent thinking,parental influences,religion,afterlife beliefs,conceptual development
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Mental Health Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Cognition, Action and Perception Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Social Cognition Research Group Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Research on Children and Families Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > UEA Experimental Philosophy Group Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Lifespan Health
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	29 Jul 2017 05:10
Last Modified:	06 Jun 2024 14:58
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/64305
DOI:	10.1016/j.jecp.2017.07.014

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