People who believe there is life after death are more hopeful when they think about death, according to a recent study.

Researcher at the University of Kent found that the prospect of death does not necessarily leave people feeling hopelessly mortal but depends rather on afterlife belief.

Dr. Arnaud Wisman and Dr. Nathan Heflick conducted studies to determine whether people lose hope when thinking about death -- known as Terror Management Theory -- under a range of different conditions.

The study was based on the premise that self-awareness among humans has been shown to create the potential for hope -- or the general expectation and feeling that future desired outcomes will occur.

Researchers first established that mortality reduced personal hope for people low in self-esteem, but not for people high in self-esteem. However, afterlife beliefs helped to preserve hope, even among those with low esteem who experience hopelessness when faced with the prospect of their own mortality.

In two studies, the researchers tested to see if immortality would help people with low self-esteem remain hopeful when thinking about death. In one, half the participants read a (bogus) statement indicating that scientists are convinced that there is life after death or a statement arguing that there is no life after death.

In the second, the researchers required that people read either a (bogus) statement that there was an identified gene that promises greatly elongated life, or a statement arguing that no such gene has been identified.

Both promises of immortality (life after death or elongated life on earth) preserved hope for people with low self-esteem when they had just thought about their own death.

Based on this finding, they determined that mortality salience affected feelings of hope among people with high and low self-esteem in different ways.