China Studies Research Centre, La Trobe University
2:30-4:00pm Thursday 15 March 2018
Room 318, Education 2 (ED2), La Trobe University
Decades of research in social psychology have shown that death anxiety can impact negatively on a person’s health and social behaviours. Yet, it is still mostly unknown how the strength of death anxiety can vary across individuals and cultures. This seminar presents findings from cross-cultural study of death anxiety in China, Japan, the USA and Australia. Consistent with the Chinese cultural taboo of mentioning ‘death’ in public, death anxiety was highest in China, followed by Japan and considerably lower in both USA and Australia. Chinese people also showed higher levels of religiosity compared to the Japanese and Australians despite their high fear of death. Subtle but important cultural differences in peoples’ feelings and thoughts about death (and life) were observed, and this talk will highlight some of the key findings.
About the Speaker
Emi Kashima, Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Psychology, is interested in broad issues concerning cultural adaptation, including human threat reactions and cross-cultural adjustment. She has published widely on coping with death reminders, from individual differences and cultural variation to brain processes. Emi is also active in international collaborative research across the globe and especially in Asia. She is currently president of the Asian Association of Social Psychology https://asiansocialpsych.org/.