Life-span psychological representations of After-life in contemporary Japanese and French youths

为了考察当代青年如何表现来世和死后的灵魂，327名日本大学生和234名法国大学生被要求在绘画中描绘(1)他们今生和来世的空间关系，(2)他们关于灵魂的形态及其死后变化过程的形象，并回答(3)由21个项目组成的关于生死观的口头问卷。1.通过对上述三种调查获得的数据进行定性和定量的分析，在不同的两种文化中，我们可以发现文化表征的几个重要的、普遍的和特定的方面。2.我们试图构建三种模型，以帮助研究灵魂和来世的文化表征。首先是概念性的，使我们能够比较不同的文化。第二种是以自下而上的方式构建的，它为我们理解下一个世界的表征结构提供了基本的框架。第三个是比前两个更具体的一个，可以用来解释主体所描绘的各种类型的灵魂。将这些模型作为人类发展的一个更大的生命周期模型，我们相信我们可以为生命周期发展心理学的未来开辟一个新的前景。3.我们已经就我们的研究撰写了一份报告(418页)，其中包含了详细的统计数据和大量由受试者提供的典型和独特的图画。

In order to investigate how the next world and the soul after death are represented by contemporaly youths, 327 Japanese and 234 French university students were asked to depict in drawing(1)their images of the spatial relationships between this world and the next world, (2)their images of the soul's form and its changing process after death, and to answer(3)the verbal questionnaire composed of 21 items concerning the naive beliefs on the life and death.1.Through the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data obtained in three sorts of inquiries above, we could find several important universal and specific aspects of cultural representations in different two cultures.2.We attempted to construct three kinds of models that could be helpful to the study of cultural representations of the soul and the next world. The first is the conceptual one that enables us to compare different cultures. The second is the one constructed in a bottom-up way using the empirical data obtained in our study and it provides the basic framework for us to understand a structure of the representation of the next world. The third is the one that is much more concrete than those previous two and could be useful to interpret various types of form of the soul depicted by the subjects. Using these models as a larger life-cycle model of human development, we believe we could open up a new vista of the future of life-span developmental psychology.3.We have written a report on our study(418 pages)with detailed statistical data and a considerable number of typical and unique drawings given by subjects.