Hand 640 Italian 18-to-22-year-olds a battery of questionnaires: one on how they attach to people they’re close to, one on how afraid they are of dying, one on whether they picture death as an ending or a passage, and one tracking anxiety, depression, OCD symptoms, and somatic complaints over the last two weeks. That’s the design behind Adult attachment, death anxiety, representation of death, and depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and somatic symptoms in early emerging adulthood: a moderated mediation model, published online Oct. 25, 2026 in Scientific Reports by Alessandro Musetti, Andrea Zagaria, Vittorio Lenzo, Gianluca Santoro, and Adriano Schimmenti of the University of Parma, and covered the same day by PsyPost. People who scored high on rejection-sensitive attachment — anxious about whether the people they love will actually stick around — reported more fear of death. That fear then predicted real distress, but only in one specific group: the people who believe death is the complete end of everything. For people who picture death as a passage to something else, the same fear of dying barely touched their symptoms at all. Epicurus wrote the countercase to exactly that belief twenty-three centuries earlier, in his Letter to Menoeceus: “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether attachment style predicts death anxiety, and whether death anxiety predicts psychological distress depending on how a person conceives of death
Who ran it?	Alessandro Musetti, Andrea Zagaria, Vittorio Lenzo, Gianluca Santoro, and Adriano Schimmenti, University of Parma
Where and when?	Scientific Reports, published online Oct. 25, 2026; covered the same day by PsyPost
Sample	640 Italian young adults, ages 18-22 (mean 20.5), 83.4% female
Average death anxiety	9.31 out of 15 on a 15-item true-or-false questionnaire
Core finding	Preoccupied (rejection-sensitive) attachment predicted higher death anxiety; dismissing attachment predicted lower reported death anxiety
The moderator	Death anxiety predicted anxiety, OCD, and somatic symptoms only among participants who view death as total annihilation — the link was weaker or absent for those who see it as a transition
What Epicurus already argued	Letter to Menoeceus: annihilation specifically is nothing to fear, since no subject remains to experience it

The Quick Version

People who are chronically worried that the people they love will abandon them also tend to be more afraid of dying. That fear of death then spreads into anxiety, OCD symptoms, and somatic complaints — but only for people who believe death is the total end of existence. For people who think something continues, the fear barely moves the needle on those same symptoms. Epicurus spent a letter to a younger friend arguing that this specific belief, annihilation, is the one that least deserves the fear it produces — because the thing doing the fearing won’t be there to suffer it.

What the Study Actually Found

Musetti’s team wasn’t trying to settle whether death anxiety is real. That’s been established for decades. They were after something narrower and more useful: what predicts it, and when does it actually translate into suffering instead of just sitting there as a background hum.

They measured attachment with the Relationship Questionnaire, a four-category tool that sorts people into secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and fearful styles based on how each pattern describes their closest relationships. Preoccupied attachment is the one worth sitting with here — it’s the style built around a nagging uncertainty about whether the people closest to you will actually stay, which shows up as hypervigilance to any sign of distance, and distress that’s disproportionate to whatever actually triggered it. Across the full sample, higher preoccupied attachment scores lined up with higher death anxiety scores, measured on a 15-item true-or-false questionnaire (sample item: “I am very much afraid to die”) where the group averaged 9.31 out of 15.

Dismissing attachment went the other way — it predicted lower reported death anxiety. Before reading that as good news, it’s worth naming what dismissing attachment actually is: a style built around minimizing the importance of closeness in the first place, as a way of not needing it. The researchers’ own framing is useful here — lower reported fear from a style defined by suppressing emotional need isn’t obviously evidence of a calmer relationship with mortality. It’s just as plausibly evidence of the same suppression showing up on a different questionnaire.

Then came the part of the design doing the real work: representation of death. Using the Testoni Death Representation Scale, a six-item tool scored on a 1-to-5 scale, the researchers sorted participants by whether they picture death as a passage to another state or as definitive annihilation. Among participants in the annihilation camp, death anxiety predicted higher anxiety, more obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and more somatic complaints. Among participants who saw death as a transition, that same path was weaker or statistically absent. One symptom broke the pattern: depression tracked with death anxiety regardless of which camp someone was in. Fear of dying, in other words, seems to feed depression no matter what you believe happens after — but it only metastasizes into anxiety, OCD symptoms, and physical complaints if you believe nothing happens after at all.

“Death anxiety is increasingly recognized as a factor involved in many forms of psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and somatic complaints,” Musetti told PsyPost. “Our findings suggest that psychological distress is influenced not only by how people relate to others, but also by how they make sense of their own mortality.”

What Did Epicurus Mean By This?

In the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus writes: “Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation… Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

This argument gets flattened into a bumper sticker so often — “don’t fear death” — that it’s easy to miss how specific it actually is. Epicurus isn’t offering comfort in general. He’s making a claim about one particular belief: annihilation. His logic runs on a materialist premise most people never state out loud but plenty quietly hold — that you are your sensations, and nothing survives the body that could register anything, including loss. If that’s true, then the two states (“I exist” and “death has arrived”) never overlap. There’s no moment where a subject is present to feel the thing it’s afraid of. Fear requires an experiencer. Annihilation, on Epicurus’s account, removes the experiencer at the exact instant the feared thing supposedly happens.

Notice what this argument does and doesn’t do. It doesn’t tell you death is good, or that dying won’t involve pain, or that grief over someone else’s death is irrational — Epicurus elsewhere is explicit that physical suffering and the loss of people you love are real costs. It targets one specific, narrower fear: the fear of the state of being dead itself, conceived as annihilation. And that’s precisely the belief Musetti’s team isolated as the one where death anxiety actually does damage. Epicurus wasn’t arguing against death anxiety in general. He was arguing against the exact subgroup the 2026 data identifies as the one carrying the cost.

Why Does Belief About Death Change the Outcome?

1. Annihilation offers no story to metabolize the fear into. A transition belief gives death anxiety somewhere to go — into questions about what the next state is, into religious or spiritual framework, into a narrative with a continuing protagonist. Annihilation offers nothing to resolve into. The fear just sits there, unprocessed, which is a plausible mechanism for why it spills into anxiety and somatic symptoms instead of staying contained.
2. Preoccupied attachment and annihilation belief compound the same underlying vulnerability. Preoccupied attachment is already a style built around fear of permanent, irreversible loss of connection. Annihilation is the one death belief that guarantees exactly that: total, irreversible loss of connection, with no continuing self to eventually reconnect with anyone. The two line up almost too neatly.
3. Depression didn’t need the moderator, which says something about what depression is tracking. Anxiety, OCD symptoms, and somatic complaints all required the annihilation belief to connect to death anxiety. Depression connected regardless. That’s consistent with depression being tied to something closer to meaning or hopelessness in general, rather than to a specific fear about the mechanics of nonexistence.
4. Dismissing attachment’s lower scores are a measurement story, not necessarily a resilience story. A style defined by suppressing the importance of emotional closeness would be expected to produce lower self-reported fear of almost anything on a self-report instrument, death included. Lower score isn’t the same as lower actual distress.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The honest version of this comparison isn’t “a Greek philosopher predicted a 2026 Italian psychology study.” It’s narrower, and it holds up better for being narrower: Epicurus’s specific claim was that annihilation, uniquely among ways of conceiving death, removes the subject who would have to suffer it — which makes it the belief least deserving of fear. Musetti’s team wasn’t testing Epicurean metaphysics. They were testing whether attachment predicts death anxiety and whether death anxiety predicts distress. But the exact subgroup where that distress showed up — people who hold the annihilation belief — is the exact subgroup Epicurus wrote the letter for.

It connects to the piece on Epicurus and katastematic pleasure, which covers the other half of Epicurus’s actual philosophy: a materialist account of pleasure built on the same premise doing the work here, that what you are is what you’re currently sensing, nothing carried forward and nothing left behind to suffer later. It sits close to the Rousseau piece on amour propre, since preoccupied attachment and amour propre are both, underneath the different vocabulary, a dependence on other people’s continued presence and approval for a stable sense of self. It rhymes with the Hierocles piece on the “cold Stoic” myth, which found that detachment reads as healthier than it necessarily is — the same gap Musetti’s team flagged in dismissing attachment’s lower scores. And it stands in useful tension with the Socrates piece on ghosting, another 2026 study where the person who looks fine from the outside (the ghoster, the dismissingly attached) is carrying more than the data on its face suggests.

The Gap Epicurus Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the comparison is more interesting than a clean match.

Epicurus was writing to one student he believed could be argued into a calmer relationship with mortality through reasoning alone. His method assumes the fear is a belief error, correctable by walking someone through the logic until it clicks. Musetti’s team is describing something that behaves less like a belief error and more like a developmental pattern: preoccupied attachment forms early, gets reinforced across years of relationships, and shows up as a trait-like vulnerability to abandonment fear generally, of which fear of death’s finality may be one expression. You can’t argue someone out of an attachment style the way Epicurus argues Menoeceus out of a mistaken premise about sensation. The logic might be sound and still miss the mechanism generating the fear.

He also had no account of a fear entangled with relationships specifically, rather than free-floating metaphysics. His argument addresses “is death bad for me,” full stop. It doesn’t address “will the people I depend on still be there” — the actual content of preoccupied attachment, of which death anxiety may be one downstream expression. Reasoning someone out of fearing annihilation doesn’t resolve a pattern that was never really about annihilation. It was about whether anyone stays.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns in either direction.

Cross-Sectional Data Can’t Separate Cause From Correlation

Every measure here — attachment, death anxiety, death representation, symptoms — was collected at a single point in time from the same people. A person already prone to anxiety may be more likely to score high on preoccupied attachment, hold an annihilation belief, and report distress, all for reasons the design can’t untangle. The researchers are explicit that this limits any causal claim.

A Narrow, Skewed Sample

640 Italian participants, 83.4% female, mostly university students recruited through social media rather than random sampling. Whether this pattern holds for older adults, non-Western samples, men at comparable rates, or anyone outside the 18-22 window this study targeted is untested here.

Self-Report Tools, Not Clinical Interviews

Attachment, death anxiety, death representation, and symptoms were all captured with brief self-report questionnaires rather than structured clinical assessment. The researchers note modest internal consistency on some of these measures — real signal, but not the precision a clinical diagnosis would require.

”Representation of Death” Is Not the Same as Religious Belief

The annihilation-versus-transition split is a psychological measure of what someone pictures happening, not a direct proxy for religious affiliation. The sample was nearly evenly split between agnostic, atheist, and religious identification, which means belief in transition wasn’t simply a stand-in for conventional religious faith.

What Actually Follows From This

1. If you’re preoccupied with whether people will leave, that worry may be quietly feeding a fear of dying you haven’t named as related. The two aren’t separate systems in this data. They move together.
2. What you believe happens after death isn’t a side question — it’s the variable that decided whether fear of dying turned into anxiety, OCD symptoms, and somatic complaints at all. That’s not an argument for adopting a belief you don’t actually hold for comfort’s sake. It’s a reason to notice that the belief itself is doing real psychological work, whether or not you’ve ever examined it directly.
3. Ask Epicurus’s actual question, not the bumper-sticker version: is there a subject left to suffer the thing I’m afraid of? His argument was built for exactly the annihilation belief this study flags as the high-risk one. If you hold that belief and the argument doesn’t land, that’s worth noticing too — it may mean the fear was never really about metaphysics to begin with, the way it likely wasn’t for Epicurus’s own most anxious readers.

Epicurus never ran a study on attachment theory, and Musetti’s team wasn’t out to vindicate a 23-centuries-old letter to a worried student. But a 2026 paper built to map how attachment and belief about death interact with psychological distress landed on the precise subgroup Epicurus addressed by name: the people for whom death means nothing continues. He thought that belief, examined clearly, should produce the least fear of all. The data says it’s currently producing the most.

---

This post discusses a 2026 study published in Scientific Reports (Musetti, Zagaria, Lenzo, Santoro, and Schimmenti, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-66174-0), reported by PsyPost on Oct. 25, 2026, and Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus. The study is cross-sectional and cannot establish that attachment style or death beliefs cause the reported psychological symptoms. If fear of death or abandonment is significantly affecting your daily life, please consider speaking with a mental health professional.