Death anxiety as mediator of relationship between renunciation of desire and mental health as predicted by Nonself Theory

In the present paper, we report two studies examining the relationships among renunciation of desires, death anxiety, and mental health. In the first study, we constructed the Desire Questionnaire (DQ), which measures success in renouncing certain desire. The DQ has satisfactory psychometric properties. In the second study, 501 adults from a Chinese society ranging in age from 17 to 84 years ( M = 35.58, SD = 14.76) completed the DQ, the Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), and the Chinese Health Questionnaire (CHQ), which measures mental health and the presence of psychiatric symptoms. As predicted, DQ had significant negative correlations with both DAS ( p