Abstract

There is a significant lack of psychological research on death-as-a-state thinking and expectations. This study aimed to map that unexplored terrain, using qualitative methodology to provide information about what people picture and feel when they think about what comes after death. We investigated conceptions of death, initial associations with the word death and polarity of feeling in death thoughts in 52 young Czech adults. We identified three main types of belief about what happens once we die: conceptions of a specific form of transcendence that comes in multiple shapes, mostly based on an eclectic combination of motifs from various eschatologies; conceptions of non-specific forms of transcendence based on a belief in continued existence in forms that are hard to imagine; conceptions of nothingness after life and for all eternity.