Despite the universality of cultural worldviews and self-esteem in providing people with general protection against death anxiety, recent empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that death anxiety is more pronounced in East-Asian collectivist cultures than in Western individualist cultures. We propose that collectivists are encumbered by the additive concerns for the mortal well-being of close others in addition to their own, whereas individualists are primarily concerned with their own mortality, which would explain the reported differential death anxiety between cultures. Focusing on individual differences in attachment avoidance, we predicted that avoidant collectivists, with disinterest in interpersonal relationships and staunch independence despite living in a collectivist culture, would report less death anxiety on par with enculturated individualists. Results from our study support the contention that elevated levels of death anxiety among collectivists are explained by their cultural predilection toward interdependence, which attachment avoidance undermines, thus leading to reduced death anxiety.

尽管文化世界观和自尊心普遍存在，可以为人们提供普遍的保护，使其免于死亡焦虑，但最近的经验和轶事证据表明，在东亚集体主义文化中，死亡焦虑比在西方个人主义文化中更为明显。我们建议，集体主义者除了自己身边的人以外，还对亲密他人的致命福祉加重关注，而个人主义者则主要关注自己的死亡率，这可以解释所报道的不同文化之间的死亡焦虑。着眼于依恋回避的个体差异，我们预测回避的集体主义者，尽管生活在集体主义文化中，但对人际关系和坚定独立性不感兴趣，报告的死亡焦虑感与有教养的个人主义者相提并论。我们的研究结果支持这样的论点，即集体主义者中死亡焦虑水平的升高可以通过他们对相互依存的文化偏爱来解释，这种依恋会破坏依恋，从而导致死亡焦虑的降低。