EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF EARLY PRESENCE OF A DEATH-MOTIVE.

This paper explores the sociological aspects of religion. In group one of high school students from Stockholm, Sweden it was found that there was a small difference between those who had earlier met a death-motive and those who had not; the former had more emotional disturbances, although this was a very weak tendency. The presence of a death-motive in the actual situation has less to do with the presence of neurotic disturbances, however. Religious words and thoughts often give birth to associations of different kinds in different persons. In order to explore a little how people react to religious stimulus-words such as Bible, a test was made in Stockholm as well as in a remote rural area in southern Sweden at a little village called Bankeryd. In both groups of school-pupils the task for the examinees was to associate a sample of words to the word Bible. Of these words, Old Age, Darkness, Autumn and War could be roughly classified as dark words. The general hypotheses formulated at the start of these investigations were that young people in Stockholm tend to associate--in general--mainly dark words to the word Bible whereas young people in the rural district on the contrary tend to associate bright words to the Bible.