Many people are afraid of death - psychologists say that each of us has a fear of death to one degree or another. The question of what a dying person feels has been asked by people at all times. The results of two recently published studies show that the emotions of dying are much more positive than accepting to count.
Kurt Gray of the University of North Carolina says death is associated with horror and nightmare for most people. However, those who do face impending death do not always think so negatively.
The authors conducted an experiment in which they studied blogs of terminally ill patients - they died of cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A control group consisted of volunteers who were asked by the authors to pretend they were terminally ill and only a few months left to live, and to make a few entries for a virtual blog. All recordings were analyzed using a special computer program - the scientists studied how often the words "fear", "horror", "anxiety", "happiness", "love" are found in them. It turned out that in the blogs of those who were really terminally ill, positively colored words were found much more often than in "fake" patients. Their recordings were filled with love and meaning.
Similar results were obtained after studying the last words of prisoners on death row, in which they addressed their inmates. Records of these words, as well as poems written by death row inmates, as well as words invented by those who only imagined themselves as prisoners going to the death penalty, were analyzed using the same computer program. The researchers were amazed that the words of those who were doomed to die were less negative than the invented notes and the words of people who were not facing death in the near future. In both experiments, it turned out that dying people were more likely to think about the meaning of life, religion and family.
Researchers, however, are not sure that such feelings are experienced by all dying people and whether the emotions of those who die of cancer are similar to the emotions of people who have lived to old age and die of old age. Be that as it may, it is quite obvious that the emotions of people preparing to end their life's journey, many of us do not represent at all as they really are.