1 Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
2 Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Jul;28(7):988-999. doi: 10.1177/0956797617701186. Epub 2017 Jun 1.
In people's imagination, dying seems dreadful; however, these perceptions may not reflect reality. In two studies, we compared the affective experience of people facing imminent death with that of people imagining imminent death. Study 1 revealed that blog posts of near-death patients with cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were more positive and less negative than the simulated blog posts of nonpatients-and also that the patients' blog posts became more positive as death neared. Study 2 revealed that the last words of death-row inmates were more positive and less negative than the simulated last words of noninmates-and also that these last words were less negative than poetry written by death-row inmates. Together, these results suggest that the experience of dying-even because of terminal illness or execution-may be more pleasant than one imagines.
在人们的想象中，死亡似乎是可怕的；然而，这些看法可能并不反映现实。在两项研究中，我们比较了即将面临死亡的人和想象自己即将面临死亡的人的情感体验。研究 1 表明，患有癌症和肌萎缩性侧索硬化症的濒死患者的博客文章比非患者模拟的博客文章更为积极，负面情绪更少——而且随着死亡的临近，患者的博客文章变得更加积极。研究 2 表明，死刑犯的遗言比非死刑犯模拟的遗言更为积极，负面情绪更少——而且这些遗言比死刑犯写的诗歌负面情绪更少。总的来说，这些结果表明，死亡的体验——即使是因为绝症或死刑——可能比人们想象的更为愉快。
