This project represents the first stage in a larger research agenda to understand chronic grief reactions with an eye toward informing new directions in assessment and clinical intervention. Although most bereaved individuals recover from loss with one year, a substantial proportion (approximately 10-20 percent) suffer from chronic depression and other grief-related symptoms, as well as increased physical illness and health problems and reduced productivity at work. Traditional models of coping with loss have provided little insight into the these difficulties and existing treatments for chronic grief have proved relatively inefficacious. The primary objective of the proposed project is to develop a more precise understanding of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that characterize chronic symptom elevations among individuals bereaved from the death of a spouse. The project will compare chronically grieved individuals (elevated depression, PTSD, and separation distress from 1.5 to 3 years post-loss) with recovered bereaved individuals and nonbereaved individuals using a set of experimental tasks and interview procedures. The primary aims are to assess predicted deficits in chronically grieved individuals' (1) attachment dynamics and (2) capacity for effective emotion regulation, and (3) to explore the interface between these two sets of mechanisms. Specifically, we predict that chronically grieved individuals will evidence the following: heightened accessibility for the representation of the deceased spouse across contexts, but also an inability to use that representation for mood repair following threat: reduced ability to use positive emotion to modulate negative emotion and reduced ability to flexibly regulation emotional expression; an attentional bias toward open-mouth disgust faces and away from closed-mouth disgust faces (i.e., attentional preoccupation with social-moral rejection); and an exacerbation of their deficits in emotion regulation when they are primed with the representation of the deceased spouse. ? ? ?
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