The purpose of this study is to develop a curriculum which integrated life education and music and to examine the effects of this integrated curriculum on senior high school students¡¦ sense of purpose of life and attitudes toward death. Using a quasi-experimental design, two freshman classes were selected from a Junior high school in Pintung County. Then the two classes were randomly assigned to the experiment group and the control group. The former received a 10-week long integrated life education/music curriculum, while the latter did not receive any treatment. Before and after the experiment, both groups of students were tested on the purpose of life and attitudes toward death, and they answered several open-ended questions about life and death. The experimental group also gave feedbacks about the curriculum. The results of this study found that, after the intervention, the two groups showed no difference in their changes in their sense of the purpose of life and attitudes toward death. However, the students evaluated the program positively; they considered the topic discussed important and liked the way it is integrated into the music curriculum. They also reported that they are inspired to contemplate the complex issue of life and death. Based upon the findings, the implications of this study were discussed.

The purpose of this study was to describe Registered Nurses’ attitudes toward death and their perspectives on education and training related to death and end-of-life patient care. A complementary goal was to determine whether nurses’ attitudes and perspectives are associated with background variables. The three attitudes toward death included anxiety, escape, and neutral attitudes. The background variables of the nurses included formal educational level, age, gender, ethnicity, years of nursing practice, state of residence, and area of nursing practice. A survey including four sections was used for data collection. The first section of the survey utilized an established 32-item survey based on the Death Attitude Profile Revised survey developed by Wong, Reker, and Gesser in 1994. The questions asked how nurses felt about the topic of death. The second section of the survey was about the extent of palliative care education and training, while the third section was concerned with the demographics of the respondents. Part four of the survey included two open-ended questions regarding attitudes toward death and how prepared respondents felt in meeting their patients’ end-of-life needs. The survey was sent to state nurses’ associations across the United States in 2015. Survey Monkey was the link for the survey and it was opened for a three-week period. The original responses totaled 248 participants. Responses with any missing values were excluded. The final dataset included 167 total responses. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis to determine the association between the variables of interest. The results of the study were most significant in relation to anxiety toward death. Nurses who were more experienced on the job, female, and with more formal education had lower anxiety levels, as did nurses with a higher confidence level in dealing with death. For the neutral attitudes, the best predictor was the rating of the nurses’ end-of-life preparation. The best predictor of the escape attitude was years of nursing experience. The results supported the need for college level end-of-life education and the significance role of nursing experience in relation to less anxiety towards death. The surprising result was that post-college end-of-life education actually increased the anxiety attitude toward death. More research is needed to ascertain if these results could be replicated. There is a need to determine what type of post-collegiate education would decrease death anxiety in nurses.

Evidence is cited in this paper which suggests religion is gaining in influence on American life. Although interest in religiosity is increasing, mental health research into the area is meager. As psychological researchers grow cognizant of the impact of social systems on the individual, it becomes important to examine the impact of religion and religious belief on the emotional health of the individual. The literature also suggests that attitudes toward death and the individual's perception of power/helplessness, which are elements closely associated with religious belief, are also important factors in determining one's state of psychological well-being. This study is an attempt to look more closely at the role of religion, attitudes toward death, and perception of power/helplessness in a psychiatric population as compared to a nonpsychiatric population. The major variable under consideration, religious orientation, was measured with the Intrinsic-Extrinsic Religious Orientation Inventory which measures the nature of one's involvement with religion. The individual with an intrinsic orientation toward religion is believed to exhibit a healthier adjustment than the individual with an extrinsic orientation toward religion. It was hypothesized that healthier religious adjustment would be related to lower death anxiety, as measured by the Death Anxiety Scale, and lower locus of control scores, as measured by the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. Further, it was assumed that whether or not one's religious belief system includes a belief in punishment after death would exert some influence on death anxiety. The information obtained in this study suggests that the most important factor of concern to psychiatric patients in the area of religious orientation and death anxiety is belief in punishment after death and its relationship to locus of control. Death anxiety was greatest in psychiatric patients who believed in punishment after death. Overall subjects who believed in punishment after death tended to exhibit higher external locus of control scores. Implications of these findings are discussed.