Cultural Variances in Composition of Biological and Supernatural Concepts of Death: A Content Analysis of Children's Literature

摘要

Children's reasoning about the afterlife emerges naturally as a developmental regularity. Although a biological understanding of death increases in accordance with cognitive development, biological and supernatural explanations of death may coexist in a complementary manner, being deeply imbedded in cultural contexts. This study conducted a content analysis of 40 children's death-themed picture books in Western Europe and East Asia. It can be inferred that causality and nonfunctionality are highly integrated with the naturalistic and supernatural understanding of death in Western Europe, whereas the literature in East Asia seems to rely on naturalistic aspects of death and focuses on causal explanations.