The common assumption that emotional expression mediates the course of bereavement is tested. Competing hypotheses about the direction of mediation were formulated from the grief work and social-functional accounts of emotional expression. Facial expressions of emotion in conjugally bereaved adults were coded at 6 months post-loss as they described their relationship with the deceased; grief an...

OBJECTIVE We previously demonstrated that parents whose children die in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) have a high level of complicated grief symptoms 6 months after the death. In this study, we investigate the change in the extent of complicated grief symptoms among these parents between 6 and 18 months postdeath and identify factors predicting improvement. METHODS One hundred thirty...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease in the world. Most AD patients become dependent on their relatives, i.e. family caregivers. Providing care to a person with AD influences caregiver's life and leads to feelings of grief, which often precede caregiver depression. The purpose of the article was to evaluate the Meuser and Marwit Caregiver Grief Inventory (MM-...

Unresolved, complicated, prolonged, or traumatic grief can have detrimental effects on mental and/or physical health. The effects of traditional grief counseling, with its focus on the client's acceptance of separation and integration of loss, are unclear. Within the model of continuing bonds, however, grief resolution includes an ongoing relationship between the living and the deceased. Sponta...

Grief is a puzzling phenomenon. It is often costly and prolonged, potentially increasing mortality rates, drug abuse, withdrawal from social life, and susceptibility to illness. These costs cannot be repaid by the deceased and therefore might appear wasted. In the following article, we propose a possible solution. Using the principles of social selection theory, we argue that an important selec...

The vast majority of bereavement research is conducted after a loss has occurred. Thus, knowledge of the divergent trajectories of grieving or their antecedent predictors is lacking. This study gathered prospective data on 205 individuals several years prior to the death of their spouse and at 6- and 18-months postloss. Five core bereavement patterns were identified: common grief, chronic grief...

There is growing interest in complicated grief reactions as a possible new diagnostic category for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, no research has yet shown that complicated grief has incremental validity (i.e., predicts unique variance in functioning). The authors addressed this issue in 2 studies by comparing grief, depression, and posttraumati...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES to describe depressive symptoms, grief, and complicated grief for bereaved family caregivers of patients who died from cancer-related causes and to explore relationships among these variables. DESIGN a nonexperimental, secondary analysis of cross-sectional descriptive data from a longitudinal intervention study evaluating the effect of providing feedback from standardized a...

Certain symptoms of grief have been shown (a) to be distinct from bereavement-related depression and anxiety, and (b) to predict long-term functional impairments. We termed these symptoms of "complicated grief" and developed the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) to assess them. Data were derived from 97 conjugally bereaved elders who completed the ICG, along with other self-report scales mea...

Bereavement following violent loss by accident, homicide or suicide increases the risk for complications in grieving. This is the first study to examine a constructivist model of grief that proposes that sense-making, or the capacity to construct an understanding of the loss experience, mediates the association between violent death and complicated grief symptomatology. An ethnically diverse sa...