This study explores the cognitive structure of death and long-term changes of death cognition after catastrophes for Chinese college students. Two months before Wenchuan earthquake, a week after, a year after, and ten years after, a total of 1507 participants' associated words of death were collected, after clustering high-frequency words' similarity coefficients, results showed that death was represented by four advanced clusters: death contact, death anxiety and its reminders, deathafter, and defense mechanism; a week after earthquake, death anxiety and its reminders, defense mechanism were activated; a year after, death contact, afterdeath were appreciated, death anxiety and its reminders, defense mechanism were underappreciated, this phenomenon still existed even ten years later, which suggests that the earthquake permanently changed their death cognition, and this change stabilized one year later. In addition, this paper provides an effective method to uncover cognitive structure of one certain concept.
Keywords: Wenchuan earthquake; death cognition; individual representation; social representation; word association.