Suicidal ideation, which includes the desire to commit suicide and specific planning for suicide, is one of the major risk factors associated with suicide. However, other than suicidal ideation, sometimes daily negative events or negative thoughts can cause people to think, “I want to die.” Previous studies have shown that the tendency is triggered by death-related thoughts, and the tendency is possibly affected by belief in determinism; however, this has not been examined previously. Thus, the present study developed “the death associative tendency scale,” which is a questionnaire to measure the tendency to associate negative thoughts and events with death-related thoughts. Moreover, the longitudinal survey revealed that the belief in determinism predicts an increase in the death associative tendency over a three-month interval. The present study newly showed that the belief in determinism might be a risk factor that increases thoughts related to death.
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