AN OXFORD University study has discovered who is most afraid of death.

Researchers have painted a complicated picture, showing that the very religious and atheists are the groups who do not fear death as much as those in-between.

The study, published in Religion, Brain and Behaviour, looked at 100 relevant articles, published between 1961 and 2014, containing information about 26,000 people worldwide.

Combining this data, they found that higher levels of religiosity were weakly linked with lower levels of death anxiety.

The effects were similar whether they looked at religious beliefs such as belief in God, and an afterlife, or religious behaviour like going to church, and praying.

Surprisingly, perhaps, 18 per cent of the studies found that religious people were more afraid of death than non-religious people; and over half the research showed no link at all between the fear of death and religiosity.

This mixed picture shows that the relationship between religiosity and death anxiety may not be fixed, but may differ from context to context. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States, with a small number carried out in the Middle East and East Asia.

Based on previous research, the team also checked to see if religious believers and disbelievers showing less death anxiety than people in between.

Out of the 100 studies, the team only found 11 studies that were robust enough to test this idea; however, of these, 10 formed this pattern,

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