The push and pull of grief: Approach and avoidance in bereavement

Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Fiona MaccallumRichard A Bryant

Abstract

Prolonged Grief (PG) is recognized as a post-bereavement syndrome that is associated with significant impairment. Although approach and avoidance tendencies have both been hypothesized to play key roles in maintaining PG symptoms, understanding of these relationships has been limited by a reliance on self-report methodology. This study applies an experimental paradigm to simultaneously investigate the relationship between PG severity and approach-avoidance behavioral tendencies. Fifty-five bereaved individuals with and without PG completed a behavioral measure of approach and avoidance responding in which they pulled or pushed a joystick in response to grief-related, positive, negative and neutral images that appeared on a computer screen. Concurrent visual feedback created the illusion that the images were either approaching or receding from the participant. Half of the participants also received a prime designed to activate their grief prior to the task. Irrespective of prime condition, PG participants pulled grief-related images more quickly than they pushed them. This difference was not observed in response to non-grief related images. Non PG participants showed no difference in their reaction times to grief-stimuli. This s...Continue Reading

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Citations

Nov 20, 2018·Journal of Dual Diagnosis·Jasmine R EddingerJoah L Williams
Jul 19, 2016·Current Opinion in Psychiatry·Bettina K Doering, Maarten C Eisma
Apr 5, 2020·Journal of Clinical Medicine·Manuel Fernández-AlcántaraMaría Nieves Pérez-Marfil
Jan 24, 2021·Behavior Therapy·Maarten C Eisma, Margaret S Stroebe
Sep 29, 2018·Biological Psychiatry : Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging·Noam SchneckJ John Mann
Jul 7, 2020·Psychiatry Research. Neuroimaging·S E KakaralaH G Prigerson

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