Images of Life and Death in the Consciousness of Young People: Psychosemantic Analysis

The article describes the results of a study of young people's ideas about life and death. The relevance of the study is determined by the system-forming role of these ideas in the organization of human life and their inevitable dynamics in conditions of social turbulence. The hypothesis was tested that the images of life and death in the minds of modern youth are not endowed with an existential, spiritual status, but are characterized as material, biological phenomena. The study involved 76 students studying in the humanities at Baikal State University. A specialized semantic differential was used as a research method, the content of thirty-nine scales of which was determined in the process of an associative experiment. It is revealed that the categorization of “life” and “death”, as well as self-image, is carried out by students according to the criteria of “emotional assessment”, “simplicity”, “meaningfulness”, “dynamism”, “randomness”, “individuality” and “materiality”. It is shown that the lifestyle is characterized by a positive emotional assessment, dynamism, while complexity and meaninglessness; The image of death is endowed by students with the semantics of joylessness, static and meaninglessness, in this context, the low values of “materiality” mark not the “spirituality” of death, but its biological determination. The analysis of the semantics of the image of the “I” in students showed its nonlinear relationship with the semantics of “life” and “death” and became the basis for the judgment of an existential crisis.