This project aimed to investigate the interrelationships between death anxiety, self-esteem, and security in a youth group, as well as to explore what role security plays in the influence of self-esteem on death anxiety. Using questionnaires from participants in two cities, we observed that both self-esteem and security in the youth population inversely predicted individuals' death anxiety and that self-esteem was significantly positively associated with security. Furthermore, this study provides evidence for potential ways in which feelings of safety mediate the association between self-esteem and death anxiety.
Overall, the youth population had higher mortality anxiety, with a mean score of 9.9(SD: 3.041), and showed a tendency to decline with age, which was consistent with Chopik's findings 41. In youth, individuals often go through the process of moving from their parents' home into college dorms and leaving campus to live alone. Thus, changes in death anxiety in young people may be related to the breakdown of family-centered intimacy and the re-establishment of individual-centered intimacy. Having a self-centered social network (intimacy) can help individuals regulate their emotions and gain a sense of meaning and value in life, thereby reducing anxiety and fear of death 42. In addition, we also found that the unemployed (and possibly college students) showed remarkable levels of death anxiety. This may be because they lack the satisfaction of the need for self-transcendence that a sense of meaning from a long-term career provides. Also, the phenomenon may be more positive after experiencing life trauma or death highlights 43.
Self-esteem inversely predicts death anxiety, and adequate self-esteem alleviates death anxiety. Terror management theory assumes that humans, influenced by a unique awareness of the fragility of life and the inevitability of death, will, out of self-protective defensive instincts, gain self-esteem through the creation and maintenance of their cultural worldviews and the pursuit of beliefs that satisfy them, to achieve anxiety buffering and alleviate terror 44. In addition, the anxiety buffering hypothesis also suggests that under conditions of death salience, if individuals can strengthen their sense of self-worth, both death anxiety and defense reactions will subsequently decrease 45. Conversely, if this mechanism is weakened, individuals require more defenses against vulnerability and death anxiety. It was found that the bilateral insulae of subjects with higher self-esteem showed reduced activation to death-related stimuli, whereas the bilateral ventral lateral prefrontal and medial orbitofrontal cortex of participants with low self-esteem showed enhanced activation to death-related stimuli, a phenomenon that may reflect the anxiety-buffering effect of self-esteem in the brain 46. Yang et al.'s investigation of patients with advanced cancer has also shown that self-esteem is a protective factor against death anxiety 47.
The sense of security includes not only the sense of security of the surroundings but also the sense of psychological security, which plays an important role in an individual's death anxiety. Exposure to traumatic events, such as natural disasters and terrorist activities, may lead to an increase in individual security concerns and a decrease in the sense of security. Moreover, Mahat-Shamir et al have found that rather than talking face-to-face with witnesses, when we are exposed through the media to horrific accounts of traumatic events because we cannot verify or refute them, there could be more serious concerns about the security situation 48. These worries may disrupt a person's anxiety buffers, trigger doubts about self-efficacy, and exacerbate death anxiety. Enhancing an individual's psychological security has a positive effect on relieving the threat of death salience and restraining death anxiety. The results of Belmi's experiment show that although there is a gender difference in the response of individuals to the significance of death, when men and women feel that they have higher power, all of them showed the enhancement of personal value and psychological security, which provided a certain degree of death anxiety protection 26.
As a mediator variable, sense of security can completely mediate the relationship between self-esteem and death anxiety. Low self-esteem induces psychosocial vulnerability, leading to the onset of insecurity and impairing mental health. As a result, individuals with low self-esteem show a higher risk of psychological disorders after a serious threatening event such as a death salience 49. In contrast, individuals with high self-esteem often show less concern about feeling safe, which helps them to avoid experiencing death anxiety. Experiments by Miller et al. showed that divers with high self-esteem and high self-efficacy did not experience a significant rise in death anxiety after experiencing a death salience due to having sufficient certainty about possible safety issues 50. In addition to this, positive attitudes towards the search for measures to maintain a sense of safety mitigated the effects of death anxiety on individuals with high self-esteem. Courtney's observation that after experiencing a death salience triggered by a large pandemic disease, such as COVID-19, the Terrorism Management Model of Health activates the defensive function of self-esteem to prompt protective strategies, i.e., self-esteem promotes the individual's ability to actively acquire effective strategies to cope with the health threats, maintains the individual's sense of security, and resists death anxiety 51.
As the only species in this world that has a concept of death, the anxiety people feel about the unpredictable inevitability of death is death anxiety. It can manifest itself in denial of death, fear of one's death and the death of others, dramatic reactions to death salience, and avoidance of interactions with the dying 52. There is now a large body of evidence that death anxiety is significantly associated with depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, eating disorders, muscle dysmorphia, and other physical and mental health problems 9,53,54. In the past few years, the global pandemic of COVID-19, which is highly contagious and has a high mortality rate, has led to the dissemination of a large amount of uncertain information through the media, resulting in death salience and triggering a threat to people's sense of security and severe death anxiety 1,4,55,56,57. In modern times, thanks to the rapid development of technology, a large number of traumatic events have been disseminated via the Internet and news media to create death salience, inevitably triggering a sense of security threat as the most active users of social media, death anxiety among young people seems unavoidable5,58. Therefore, exploring the protective role of self-esteem and a sense of security is important for preventing and alleviating death anxiety and concomitant physical and mental disorders and for promoting the overall health of the youth population.
Limitation
Although we controlled for the risk of bias as much as possible, this study still has several limitations. First, we considered factors such as gender, age, and occupation as covariates, yet a further number of factors were not adequately considered. To ensure the accuracy of the findings, other variables, such as Internet use and Engel's coefficient, should be more tightly controlled in future work. Secondly, considering the potential impact of the economic development level on the cultural environment, Shenzhen and Shaoguan were chosen as representatives in this study, but all sample data came from Guangdong Province. The problem may be solved if possible, future studies can consider collecting information and increasing sample size from different regions. Finally, as a cross-sectional study, our findings do not allow us to infer a necessary association between exposure (i.e., self-esteem and security) and outcome (i.e., death anxiety). Further research is needed to design systematic and scientific experiments to expose the mechanism of action of this effect.