Students' Attitudes Toward Death, The Subjective Sense Of Happiness And Coping Styles Of Research

Death attitude is one's beliefs and feelings of death, which are subjective and multi-dimensional. It contains three components of cognition, emotion and action. At first, the research on death attitude and the emotions was focus on the fear and anxiety of one's death and dying what happens on oneself and others.With the developing of death attitude research, the contents of death attitude changes, and the measuring tools become perfect. Researchers come to recognizing that positive and negative emotions and feelings may coexist at the attitude toward death. Integrating the related researches, the most important connotation of the attitude toward death is:fear of death, death avoidance,neutral acceptance, approach acceptance, escape acceptance. Researchers of foreign countries and Hong Kong and Taiwan region of China have accumulated rich theoretical and empirical research results on attitude toward death. However domestic researches in this area are mostly about old people, patients and medical related personnel. Although there are studies on children and students, they only concern about the impact of individual variables on death attitude rather than the studies on in-depth of psychological variables. Researches on subjective well-being and coping styles are much more than death attitude, but these also don't involve attitudes toward death. The purpose of this study is to investigate the features of college students'death attitude, and the relationship between death attitude, subjective well-being and coping style, combining with SWB and simple Coping Style Questionnaire.This study uses questionnaire method, including the Taiwan Chinese version of the Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R), General Well Being Scale (GWB) and Simple Coping Style Questionnaire. The result suggests that: (1) College students get the highest score on the neutral acceptance dimension, which means that most college students consider that death is a natural process, without fear or welcome. (2) There isn't significant difference on death attitude between students of different gender. However students'death attitude is significantly different only on the approach acceptance dimensions, which are from different grade.(3) Different gender students'subjective well-being has no significant differences, so are the different grades.(4) College students used more positive coping styles, on which there is no significant gender differences in general. Different grades are significantly different in the dimensions of positive response. (5) Subjective well-being, death attitude and coping style are significantly correlated, there is predict of varying degrees among these three variables.