Abstract
The fading affect bias (FAB) occurs when unpleasant affect fades faster than pleasant affect. To detect mechanisms that influence the FAB in the context of death, we measured neuroticism, depression, anxiety, negative religious coping, death attitudes, and complicated grief as potential predictors of FAB for unpleasant/death and pleasant events at 2 points in time. The FAB was robust across older and newer events, which supported the mobilization-minimization hypothesis. Unexpectedly, complicated grief positively predicted FAB, and death avoidant attitudes moderated this relation, such that the Initial Event Affect by Grief interaction was only significant at the highest 3 quintiles of death avoidant attitudes. These results were likely due to moderate grief ratings, which were, along with avoidant death attitudes, related to healthy outcomes in past research. These results implicate complicated grief and death avoidant attitudes as resiliency mechanisms that are mobilized during bereavement to minimize its unpleasant effects.
Highlights
People undergo a host of psychological challenges in the wake of a significant loss, even though most individuals recover quickly [1]
We found a robust fading affect bias (FAB), such that affect faded more for unpleasant events than for pleasant events, and unpleasant affect faded more for older events than for newer events
Death avoidant attitudes moderated this unexpected effect, such that the Initial Event Affect by Grief interaction was not significant at low levels of death avoidant attitudes, but the effect increased as the individual difference variable increased
Summary
People undergo a host of psychological challenges in the wake of a significant loss, even though most individuals recover quickly [1]. One indicator of healthy bereavement may involve the phenomenon referred to as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB) [2,3,4], where unpleasant emotions fade faster than pleasant emotions [5,6,7]. The literature on the FAB has examined the phenomenon across a variety of events, including significant/death and non-significant/everyday events [8]. Studies have not examined the relation of bereavement outcomes to the FAB for these types of events. Such an investigation may reveal mechanisms involved in bereavement. We designed the current study to examine the relation of FAB to three main bereavement related outcomes: complicated grief, negative religious coping, and death attitudes
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