Fear of Death Dipped After Ukraine Invasion Began, Hungarian Study Finds

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, researchers in neighboring Hungary were in the middle of collecting survey data on death anxiety, meaning in life, and coping. The timing allowed them to split their post-pandemic sample into people who answered before the invasion and people who answered after it, creating an unplanned window into how a nearby war reshapes existential psychology in real time. The results, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, are more nuanced than a simple story of rising fear.

The study was a repeated cross-sectional design built on three independent Hungarian samples rather than the same people followed over time. The first sample of 249 adults was collected between June and November 2019, before COVID-19 existed. The second wave of data collection ran from 11 January to 20 August 2022, after the COVID-19 wave associated with the second-highest mortality in Hungary, and gathered 413 participants. Because the invasion began on 24 February 2022, those 413 participants could be divided by questionnaire completion date into 265 who responded before the outbreak and 148 who responded after it. All participants were Hungarian adults recruited through targeted snowball sampling via an online questionnaire, spanning medical professionals, non-medical helping professionals, and non-helping professionals.

The researchers measured three psychological domains with validated Hungarian instruments. Fear of death was assessed with the Multidimensional Fear of Death Scale, which covers eight dimensions including fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear of being destroyed, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for the body after death, and fear of premature death. Meaning in life was measured with the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, distinguishing the presence of meaning, the sense that one’s life is meaningful, from the search for meaning, the motivation to find or deepen it. Coping competencies were captured with the 80-item Psychological Immune System Inventory, which assesses 16 competencies organized into three systems: a Monitoring-Approach System, a Mobilizing, Creating and Executing System, and a Self-Regulatory System.

The most striking descriptive finding concerned fear of death itself. Compared with the post-COVID sample collected before the invasion, the sample collected after the outbreak showed lower descriptive levels of fear of death. Total scores on the fear-of-death scale averaged 114 before the pandemic, rose to 118 in the pre-invasion post-COVID sample, and fell to 113 after the invasion began, although these differences in total scores did not reach statistical significance. Significant between-group differences did emerge for specific dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear for significant others, and fear of premature death, with the pre-invasion post-COVID sample generally scoring higher than the others. The authors suggest this counterintuitive dip may reflect distal defense processes described by terror management theory, in which overwhelming mortality concerns are managed through defensive processes rather than conscious reflection, though they emphasize that these mechanisms were not directly assessed.

The coping picture was more consistently negative. Overall scores on the Psychological Immune System Inventory were significantly lower in both post-COVID samples than in the pre-pandemic sample, with no significant difference between the two later samples. Individual competencies that dropped significantly included sense of coherence, sense of self-growth, social empathy, challenge and flexibility, problem-solving capacity, social creating capacity, synchronicity, and emotional control. Sense of coherence, which reflects the perception of life as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful, fell from an average of 16.7 before the pandemic to 15.5 after the invasion outbreak. The authors interpret these declines as less favorable coping profiles emerging under the combined weight of pandemic and war-related stressors, possibly reflecting strain on emotional regulation under prolonged population-level stress.

Meaning in life told a subtler story. Scores on the presence of meaning, the search for meaning, and total meaning in life did not differ significantly across the three periods. Yet the search for meaning emerged as a consistently relevant variable across nearly every analysis conducted. In the regression models predicting fear of death, emotional control was the strongest predictor before the pandemic and remained strongest in the pre-invasion post-COVID sample, but after the invasion outbreak the pattern changed: the search for meaning became a significant positive predictor of fear of death, alongside positive thinking, social creating capacity, and irritability control. Correlation analyses similarly showed that the search for meaning developed significantly stronger positive associations with fear of conscious death and fear of being destroyed in the post-invasion sample.

The relationships among constructs shifted as much as the levels. Associations between coping competencies and meaning in life were generally stronger after COVID-19 and remained stronger for most competencies after the invasion. Meanwhile, correlations between coping competencies and overall fear of death were generally weaker in both post-COVID samples than before the pandemic. Notably, the correlation between presence of meaning and search for meaning, which was slightly negative in the earlier samples, turned positive and significant at 0.231 in the post-invasion sample, suggesting these two dimensions became more closely interconnected under ongoing existential uncertainty. Network analyses, which map the web of associations among all variables, suggested a closer integration of meaning-related processes with fear of death and coping resources after the invasion, with the search for meaning appearing more embedded in the overall network structure.

The authors frame these patterns through terror management theory, which holds that large-scale death-related events such as pandemics and wars act as mortality salience triggers, and that self-esteem and culturally shared worldviews serve as distal anxiety-buffering mechanisms. From this perspective, the descriptively lower fear-of-death levels observed alongside reduced coping resources and heightened meaning-seeking may indicate a shift from consciously experienced death-related concerns toward more indirect existential coping. The authors are careful to note that this interpretation rests on indirect evidence, since distal defense processes were not directly measured, and that the network findings should be treated as exploratory because bootstrap analyses showed limited stability of the centrality estimates.

Several limitations temper the conclusions. The samples were recruited through convenience sampling via selected online communities, including bereavement counselor groups and psychology communities, so the findings cannot be considered representative of the Hungarian population, and women were heavily overrepresented in all three samples. Because the three samples were independent rather than longitudinal, the results reflect between-sample differences across historical periods, not within-person change, and no causal claims are possible. Individual exposure to war events and media consumption were not measured, no correction for multiple testing was applied across the exploratory analyses, and some subscales showed relatively low internal consistency. The post-invasion data also capture only the immediate, short-term phase of the conflict, not longer-term adaptation.

Even with those caveats, the study offers a rare snapshot of existential psychology at the moment a war began in a neighboring country. Its practical implication is that mental health interventions prepared for prolonged societal crises should account for longer-term existential anxiety processes and their delayed psychological and social consequences, rather than focusing only on visible distress. The convergence of findings across correlations, regression models, analyses of variance, and network analyses suggests that under stacked existential threats, the way people seek meaning may matter as much as how afraid they are, and that meaning-making processes may function as an important adaptive resource precisely when coping resources are wearing thin.

Subject of Research: Changes in fear of death, meaning in life, and coping competencies across the COVID-19 pandemic and the early phase of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Hungarian samples

Article Title: Facing the unforeseen: coping, meaning in life, fear of death, and their associations across the COVID-19 pandemic and the early phase of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a repeated cross-sectional study in independent Hungarian samples

Article References: Szimon, P., Takacs, N., & Zana, A. (2026). Facing the unforeseen: coping, meaning in life, fear of death, and their associations across the COVID-19 pandemic and the early phase of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a repeated cross-sectional study in independent Hungarian samples. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, 1916005. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1916005

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1916005

Keywords: fear of death, meaning in life, coping, COVID-19, Russia-Ukraine war, terror management theory, Hungary, repeated cross-sectional study, death anxiety, sense of coherence, search for meaning, network analysis