Personal Death Metaphors (RDFS) Test

People who want to understand how they imagine mortality may find the Personal Death Metaphors (RDFS) Test useful for organizing feelings that are easier to express as images than direct statements. This assessment of personal death metaphors focuses on whether death is pictured through threat and loss or through change, release, and continued existence. The result offers a profile for thoughtful reflection rather than a single attitude label.

What This Assessment Explores

As a death metaphor test, the questionnaire explores meanings attached to anticipated personal death through contrasting metaphors. Comforting parent, family reunion, and peaceful garden suggest connection or continuation; dense fog, devouring tiger, black hole, and falling off a cliff suggest uncertainty, danger, separation, or finality. Both directions may coexist in one person.

Together, these images create a death-metaphor profile across two dimensions:

• Negative Metaphors (0-36) measures death as loss, ending, or destruction; Low 0-12, Moderate 13-24, and High 25-36 are the displayed bands.
• Positive Metaphors (0-36) measures death as transition, liberation, or continuation of existence in another form; Low positive imagery 0-12, Moderate positive imagery 13-24, and High positive imagery 25-36 are the displayed bands.

Higher negative scores may indicate a more anxious or negative attitude toward death, while higher positive scores may indicate greater acceptance and calm. The profile supports reflection on emotional responses to mortality.

Methodology and Scientific Basis

Each item presents one metaphor and asks how accurately it describes the respondent’s conception of personal death. Five options run from “Does not describe at all” to “Describes quite accurately,” with a middle choice for uncertainty. It is a self-report task: the respondent judges personal fit, not correctness.

In this questionnaire, personal death imagery supplies the symbolic material, while the result reports separate scores for the two dimensions rather than one overall score. The displayed scores are interpreted within their ranges; these are not clinical cutoffs.

The structure is conceptually consistent with the Revised Death Fantasy Scale and the earlier Death Fantasy Scale, both of which use metaphors to examine personal death. In this questionnaire, the paired dimensions allow a person to notice whether threatening and consoling associations appear together or pull in different directions.

Those studies offer relevant background, but they do not establish matching norms, reliability, or validity for this online version. Mood, beliefs, experience, and candidness can influence responses, so the result is a snapshot of present meanings, not a fixed trait.