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Record W4409150364 · doi:10.1080/17439760.2025.2487439

“What is the point of it all if we are just going to die anyway?”: Exploring Heideggerian concepts of ‘developing-towards-death’ with children using arts-based existential therapy

2025· article· en· W4409150364 on OpenAlex
Zachary Fry, Adrianna Mendrek, James B. Crooks, Terra Léger‐Goodes, David Lefrançois, Jonathan Smith, Nathalie Maltais, Marie‐Claude Geoffroy, Marc–André Éthier, Catherine Malboeuf‐Hurtubise

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Positive Psychology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicGrief, Bereavement, and Mental Health
Canadian institutionsUniversité de MontréalUniversité du Québec en OutaouaisUniversité du Québec à RimouskiUniversité de SherbrookeUniversité du Québec à MontréalMcGill UniversityBishop's University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsExistentialismPsychologyThe artsPsychoanalysisPoint (geometry)Social psychologyEpistemologyPsychotherapistPhilosophyLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time (1927) is profoundly impactful, and yet, a neglected aspect of it pertains to child development.Aims The central research question guiding this qualitative study was: when provided with opportunities for creative expression and philosophical inquiry, do children’s attitudes towards death align with Heidegger’s (1927) theories of death and existence?Method Using an arts-based existential therapy approach, we conducted two 60-minute workshops over 2 weeks with elementary school children aged 11-12 providing them with an opportunity to openly reflect on death.Results Participants were transparent in expressing their thoughts and feelings about death and expressed thinking of death often, emphasizing it was almost every day. Children’s perceptions of death were also consistent with Heidegger’s (1927) analysis of Being-towards-death, existential anxiety, and anticipatory resoluteness.Discussion Following an analysis, arts-based existential interventions show promise for the potentiality of adapting Heidegger’s phenomenology for children.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.713
Threshold uncertainty score0.744

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.164
GPT teacher head0.456
Teacher spread0.292 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it