Expression Of Grief Research Articles

Mourning, Bereavement and the Grief-Work of Traumatic Brain Injured Patients: Theory and Practice

Background: Grief, as a universal human experience, follows certain stages as described in different (at times overlapping) models, by various researchers. However, the completion of certain emotional tasks and processes is required for grief to be resolved, allowing us to return to full living. The dynamics and expression of grief and mourning in the traumatic brain-injured patient present specific challenges for therapeutic intervention since the mourner may be impaired both cognitively and emotionally by the sequelae of their injury and is often unable to work-through their grief in a coherent and continuous process. In these cases, the therapist should take a very active role in the process, eliciting memories and emotions, and then integrating them together with the patient’s associations and post-injury experiences, and grief reactions to the current loss. Moreover, when the loss occurs during, or after a rehabilitation program, the therapist’s memories of anecdotes previously recounted by the patient may be elicited and offered by the therapist, and incorporated into the present treatment. Procedure: A case will be presented illustrating the complexity of the mourning process in a traumatic brain injured patient. Conclusion: While keeping in mind the general reccomendations for the grief-work with traumatic brain injured persons, there is a clear need to “tailor” an individual approache for each and every single patient.

Монголын нүүдэлчдийн уран зохиол дахь аавын дүр буюу хүн байхын учир

In Mongolian oral and written literature, you will not find a writer who has not written or spoken about his mother and father. In both ancient and modern Mongolian literature, parental roles and attributes have come to be seen in many forms and colors. Parents are the ones who wear them for the happiness and well-being of their children. When the word «father» is used in Mongolian language, the first words that come to mind with it are «mother», then «homeland», «son», «mountain», «god», etc., all of which highlight the meaning and essence of human life. Modern Mongolian literature contains thousands of works about the father. Analyzing about 60 works of more than 100 writers and poets on this topic, we can see many differences in the image of the father, age, mood, character, compassion, merit for his children, sincerity, etc. When expressing the role of a father in contemporary Mongolian literature, it has been embossed with the following six general characteristics: 1) the child’s inner desire to repay and respond to his or her father’s beneficence; 2) the sacred image of father and a precious memory left or kept in a moment; 3) cordial confession by children for their parents from a far place; 4) the expression of grief over the loss of a loving father; 5) the joy of rejoicing in the love and filial piety by father; 6) the expression of protecting or taking sides of father from any evil force.

And the Beat Goes On: Heartbeat Recordings through Music Therapy for Parents of Children with Progressive Neurodegenerative Illnesses.

Background: Music is a powerful therapeutic intervention to promote physical and psychological health, healing, and well-being. In pediatric palliative care, music therapists are often involved in preloss care. Heartbeat recordings (HBRs) synchronize the rhythm of the heartbeat into a favorite song. In preloss care, HBRs show promise in helping parents of children with progressive neurodegenerative illnesses (PNDI) cope with their chronic sorrow and the loss of their child. Objective: To explore the lived experience of HBRs for bereavement in the lives of parents of children with PNDI. Design: Phenomenological study. Setting/Subjects: Purposeful sample of 11 English-speaking parents of children with PNDI receiving palliative care services in an academic pediatric hospital were interviewed three months after receiving their child's HBR. Measurements: A semistructured interview guide was used to collect data concurrently with the mind mapping process. Results: Data from interviews revealed 4 major themes and 10 subthemes: (1) Bifocal View (parental lens vs. medical lens); (2) Navigating Life and Relationships (caregiver fatigue, grief and loss, marriage, job, brought us together, paying it forward); (3) Coping through Spirituality; and, (4) Legacy Creation (HBR as a connection, song selection). Conclusions: Parents of children with PNDI experience chronic sorrow. The HBR assisted in meaning-making that validated the child's life and supported the parents' expression of grief and their ability to cope. Further research is needed to validate the impact of HBRs in diverse populations.

Grief: The Epidemic Within an Epidemic.

COVID-19 has not only dramatically changed the way we live, it has also impacted how we die and how we grieve. With more and more Americans dying in ICU settings, away from family, and more funerals being held virtually, the pandemic has seriously curtailed normal expressions of grief and cultural mourning. Given the CDC guidelines for funerals and social distancing, simple human touch is no longer a mitigating force against prolonged grief. So, while one epidemic has a face and a name, we point to a second, more silent yet potentially equally devastating one, unacknowledged grief, and emphasize how policy can be a current therapeutic. We can wait for a vaccine, but we can also act now through thoughtful policymaking that acknowledges this second epidemic.

Gendering grief: The Strī Parvan of the Mahābhārata

The article focuses on Śānti Parvan, a small section of the Mahābhārata, describing the scene after the cataclysmic war. It explores the convergences and divergences between masculine and feminine expressions of grief in response to bereavement, as described here. The former appears to be concerned with identities of the dead as kshatriyas and kings. The latter, on the other hand, focuses more centrally on the dead as kinsmen-related through both natal and marital ties, even as there are overlaps.

Bodily grief work meets Christian interiority: The Meru case

This article focuses on a dramatic emotional expression of grief and explores how the traditional mourning practice–played out by Meru women, in northern Tanzania–encounters Christian interiority. The Meru have been exposed to modernization and westernization, through colonization, missionization, and later through independence, development projects and global neoliberal economy, but according to the Lutheran church, mourning women still behave like pagans. The article explores the gendering of emotions and the symbolism of the womb which seems to be the seat of female emotions and the idiom of life and death and tries to understand why women mourn their loss in an outwardly emotional way.

Caregiver behaviors and childhood maladaptive grief: Initial validation of the Grief Facilitation Inventory

The Grief Facilitation Inventory (GFI) is a newly-developed measure of caregiver behaviors theorized to facilitate or hinder children’s adaptive grief reactions. We examine its factor structure, reliability, and validity. An exploratory factor analysis identified four factors: Ongoing Connection, Existential Continuity/Support, Caregiver Grief Expression, and Grief Inhibition/Avoidance. Both child- and caregiver-report versions had adequate-to-good internal consistency. The child-report GFI showed evidence of criterion-referenced validity via significant correlations with measures of child maladaptive grief and other psychological symptoms. Results provide preliminary evidence of the reliability, validity, and clinical utility of the GFI as a measure of caregiver grief-facilitation behaviors.

Anaesthetists' attitudes towards attending the funerals of their patients: A cross-sectional study among Australian and New Zealand anaesthetists.

A patient's death can pose significant stress on the family and the treating anaesthetist. Anaesthetists' attitudes about the benefits of and barriers to attending a patient's funeral are unknown. Therefore, we performed a prospective, cross-sectional study to ascertain the frequency of anaesthetists' attendance at a patient's funeral and their perceptions about the benefits and barriers. The primary aim was to investigate the attitudes of anaesthetists towards attending the funeral of a patient. The secondary aims were to examine the perceived benefits of and barriers to attending the funeral and to explore the rate of bonds being formed between anaesthetists, patients and families. Of the 424 anaesthetists who completed the survey (response rate 21.2%), 25 (5.9%) had attended a patient's funeral. Of the participants, 364 (85.9%) rarely formed special bonds with patients or their families; 233 (55%) believed that forming a special bond would increase the likelihood of their attendance. Showing respect to patients or their families was the most commonly perceived benefit of attending a funeral. Participants found expression of personal grief and caring for the patient at the end-of-life and beyond beneficial to themselves and the family. Fear of their attendance being misinterpreted or perceived as not warranted by the family as well as time restraints were barriers for their attendance. Most anaesthetists had never attended a patient's funeral. Few anaesthetists form close relationships with patients or their families. Respect, expression of grief and caring beyond life were perceived benefits of attendance. Families misinterpreting the purpose of attendance or not expecting their attendance and time restraints were commonly perceived barriers. Trial registration: ACTRN 12618000503224.

Musical mourning in Manchester: Cultural norms, expectations, and meaning in grief

Grief is a culturally-situated praxis, where cultural phenomena convey norms and expectations for grief expression and reconciliation. Music is one example of a cultural phenomenon that can inform grief and mourning. Utilizing narrative thematic analysis, the author examined cultural messages within music lyrics of 36 songs performed at the One Love Manchester 2017 benefit concert. Four themes—emotional expression, active mourning, expectations, and meaning-making—are presented as a poem to reflect the creative form and delivery of music. Findings indicated conflicting emotional and behavioral grief expressions, and time was an influential factor in expectations and meaning-making processes conveyed throughout lyrics.

McDreamy is McDead: Fan responses to a parasocial break-up

Grounded in scholarship regarding post-object fandom, parasocial break-ups and parasocial grief, this research explored tweets regarding the death of a long-running, central character on the TV show Grey’s Anatomy. A theory-driven thematic analysis revealed five major themes including: emotional expressions of grief, recovery and coping, advocating, not wanting to watch, and memorializing, each encompassing various subthemes. Fans expressed these responses with varying levels of intensity. The results suggest that there are fan responses to a parasocial break-up, especially a parasocial death, not suggested in prior studies that should be examined in future research. Furthermore, a parasocial break-up can be a powerful experience for fans even disrupting their everyday lives.

The Masking of Mourning: Social Disconnection After Bereavement and Its Role in Psychological Distress.

Social support has been shown to facilitate adaptation after bereavement in some studies but not others. A felt sense of social disconnection may act as a barrier to the utilization of social support, perhaps explaining these discrepancies. Factorial and psychometric validity of the Oxford Grief-Social Disconnection Scale (OG-SD) was tested in a bereaved sample (N = 676). A three-factor solution (negative interpretation of others’ reactions to grief expression, altered social self, and safety in solitude) fit the data best and demonstrated excellent psychometric validity. A second three-wave longitudinal sample (N = 275) recruited 0 to 6 months following loss and followed up 6 and 12 months later completed measures of prolonged grief disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and the OG-SD at each time point. High levels of baseline social disconnection were associated with concurrently high psychological distress. The extent to which social disconnection declined over time predicted resolution of psychological distress.

Expressions of Grief in Online Discussion Forums-Linguistic Similarities and Differences in Pet and Human Bereavement.

We compared online discussion forum posts related to pet loss to those related to human bereavement. Posts (N = 401) were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software for frequencies of word use relevant to bereavement. Words related to anger, sadness, and negative emotions were used at similar frequencies for all grief. Sibling loss was associated with using first person pronouns at higher frequencies, and positive emotion words at lower frequencies than other categories of loss. There were some similarities in partners and pets in the word use related to friends and social connectedness. Words related to religion were highest when writing about losing a child and lowest when losing a pet. Our results highlight the similarities in the vocabulary in pet and human bereavement. Findings demonstrate the importance of online discussion forums for understanding the process of grief and specific relationship types.

Unmaking the Anthropology of Mourning in a Psycho Analytical Perspective

Death often raises questions that science is unable to answer. Science may delay death, but it cannot stop it. Death is marked by grief and mourning. Mourning serves in a smooth transition, such as a liminal ritual of grief serves as a rite de passage between loss and re-enactment to the routine life. Generally, mourning or grief is described as a very private, personal emotion which is characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world. However, mourning also serves as an overt and public expression of grief whereby it serves as an identity marker to a community. The paper attempts to present a cross-cultural account of mourning and presents a psychoanalytical perspective of mourning with special emphasis on azaadari. The study presents an ethno theory on grief and reflections of mourning from a cross-cultural perspective.

Health professionals' experiences of grief associated with the death of pediatric patients: a systematic review.

The objective of this review was to synthesize the experiences of health professionals who have experienced grief as a result of a pediatric patient dying. There has been some research into health professionals' grief experiences associated with the death of pediatric patients, but there has not been a review that synthesizes the findings of these experiences. Other related reviews have focused on prenatal, perinatal or adult deaths or the coping strategies employed by health professionals. This review highlights the complexities of experiences faced by pediatric health professionals. Qualitative studies involving pediatric health professionals working in any healthcare setting who had experienced grief from the death of a patient were considered for inclusion. Studies were conducted in any country, at any time and published in English. The search was conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. The search was completed in January 2019. The review followed principles of meta-aggregation in line with the JBI approach. Methodological quality assessment was based on representation of participants' voices and congruence between research methodology and both research question and analysis of data. Meta-aggregation led to three synthesized findings from 12 qualitative studies that met the inclusion and methodological quality criteria. Studies predominantly included nurses working in a hospital, with sample sizes ranging from six to 25 participants. The synthesized findings were physical, behavioral, psychological or spiritual symptoms; compounding grief; and alleviating grief. Physical, behavioral, psychological, or spiritual symptoms highlighted the various characteristics of grief experiences by health professionals. Compounding grief was the largest synthesized finding and incorporated the various factors that contributed to a poorer experience of grief. Alleviating grief showed the limited identified factors that improved the experience of grief. Methodological quality led to synthesized findings receiving a ConQual rating of low or moderate. The synthesized findings from this review highlight the varied reported experiences of grief in health professionals. The methodological quality and reporting of studies, however, led to decreased confidence in the synthesized findings and recommendations arising from this review. Healthcare professionals should be aware of the potential for experiencing grief when a patient dies and the compounding and alleviating factors associated with this. Further research could expand participant and language limitations, and improve methodological quality and reporting.

Familie og følelser i det romerske Kartago

This article discusses the epitaphs with epithets from two burial grounds at Carthage excavated by Alfred-Louis Delattre in the last decades of the 19th century. He found more than 900 Latin inscriptions that can be dated between the late first century and the early third century CE. Most of those buried at the so-called ‘cimetières des officiales’ were imperial slaves and freedmen together with their relatives and include almost 1300 individuals. Epithets occur just in about sixty epitaphs or about 6 % of the inscriptions from the imperial burial grounds at Carthage. The inscriptions are mostly short with certain conventions. The employment of epithets characterized the moral qualities of the commemorated seen from the commemorator’s point of view and is an expression of feelings, emotions and grief. The epitaphs from Carthage come from a well-defined context within a well-defined group, which may share the same feelings and be called an emotional community. The analysis of the most common epithets demonstrates remarkable differences between their use at Carthage and in the funerary inscriptions found in Rome.

The Expression of Self and Grief in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Distant Readings

When writing about grief, Peter N. Stearns and Mark Knapp (‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrot (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138) speculate that ‘[i]n contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate’. Inspired by this claim, we investigated the usage of pronouns, as well as topics surrounding grief, in ballads taken from broadsides in the nineteenth century. We found that the use of first-person pronouns increases over the nineteenth century, and that this was not a linear trend; there were sharp increases in the usage of first-person pronouns beginning in 1815, which leveled off in the third quarter of the century. Additionally, we examined the usage of lyrical topics about death, grieving, negatively valenced emotion and sadness, and asked whether such topics correlated with the increased usage of first-person pronouns. We found that there was not a strong correlation with the usage of pronouns and such topics, though there was a small correlation between the usage of such pronouns and sadness and a stronger positive correlation between a focus on the present and positively valenced emotion. These findings suggest that first-person pronouns are not reliable indicators of lyrical topics surrounding grief, or vice-versa. Using personal pronouns as a measure of intimacy, we conclude that songs written in the beginning of the nineteenth century did see a rise in intimacy in song lyrics. However, this increase does not appear to be tied to songs about grief, specifically. Despite the existence of many personal grief songs in the Victorian period, our distant reading reveals linguistic trends and interrelations that challenge the intuition that nineteenth-century grief songs were more personal than earlier ones.

The Poetry of Dennis Haskell: Stylisation and Elegy

In this essay I concentrate on the elegiac poetry of the Australian poet Dennis Haskell. I argue that the emphasis in Haskell’s work on the quotidian, clarity of expression and the communication of emotion, has a material effect on the ways in which Haskell approaches the elegiac project: the poetic expression of grief in the face of loss. In the essay I identify three main classes of elegy in Haskell’s oeuvre: elegies for fellow poets (which, after Lawrence Lipking, I call “tombeaux”); the familial elegy; and the spousal elegy. Haskell’s engagement with the genre of the elegy therefore occupies a spectrum between what might be termed “public” elegies, and “intimate” elegies. As I discuss, the intimate elegies indicate a more profound, and sometimes troubled, engagement with the genre of elegy, tipping on occasion in anti -elegy and self-elegy. By undertaking textual analyses of various poems from within the three classes of elegy practised by Haskell, I illustrate the different ways in which he deals with one of the most profound problems that faces an elegist: how to express the profound emotion of grief through the affordances of poetic stylisation.

Empathy for Post-Abortion Grief in Louise Lambrichs's Journal d'Hannah (1993)

If abortion as a reproductive experience continues to retain a certain 'unspeakability' that keeps it on the margins of culture, the expression of grief or mourning in its wake remains even more inexpressible; to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, no matter how fraught the circumstances, would seem to require the forfeiture of a right to acknowledge any resulting psychic loss. In her 1993 novel Journal d'Hannah, Louise Lambrichs gives us the 'diary' of a woman whose late-term abortion during WWII results in sterility. In mourning, Hannah creates an interior dream world in her diary in which her aborted daughter grows up in real time, as she remains unable to vocalize the pain of her loss to the exterior world. In this article, I explore the novel's capacity to push our understanding of what kinds of 'parental' mourning are acceptable and representable, and the ways in which the narrative confronts the lack of a broader cultural language with which to address this specific kind of grief.<br/> This article grounds its examination of Hannah's interiorized grief in theoretical notions of the unspeakability of trauma and feminist definitions of bodily integrity in the imaginary domain. I situate Lambrichs's work not as an anti-feminist indictment of abortion, as some have understood it, but as a challenge to open up a discursive space that enables an empathetic understanding of the diverse ways in which women deal with the voluntary termination of a pregnancy. Drawing on Barbara Johnson's (1986) exploration of the poetics of loss and abortion, I argue that the vocalization of post-abortion mourning need not result in the conclusion that taking 'the woman's feelings of guilt and loss into consideration... is to deny the right to choose the act that produced them' (33). The novel does not 'resolve' the tension of the confusing liminal space between life and death that abortion creates, but rather works to confront this liminality head on in a way that serves to question the limits of the ethics of parental mourning.

Missing, or Just Missed? Mediating Loss in the Missing Richard Simmons Podcast

This study critically examines the Missing Richard Simmons podcast to explore how producers and participants use media to define and process complex relationships with celebrity figures. Employing qualitative textual analysis, this research demonstrates how audiences mediate celebrity interactions and the potential role these relationships play within a marginalized and fragile community. This project qualitatively explores parasocial interactions to demonstrate the ways expressions of grief and loss are mediated by audiences when a celebrity “relationship” disappears. In using a podcast to rekindle a celebrity connection, this study shows the impact that podcast hosts may have on messages presented to the audience.

Attributions About Bereaved Spouses: Testing the Myths of Coping With Loss.

Social expectations influence how we cope with loss and how people in our social networks respond to us. Wortman and Silver outlined Western cultural assumptions, or myths, about mourning, thought to influence judgments of one's grief response. In particular, the two myths hypothesized to affect social judgments about grievers' adjustment were related to (a) the intensities of the grief response and (b) the duration of the grief response. We assessed if these myths affected the attributions of potential support providers in a convenience sample of 510 Amazon Mechanical Turk community participants. The results indicated preheld expectancies that expressing and processing loss is important to recover from grief was related to attributions about the adjustment of spousally bereaved grievers in vignettes. However, any level of grief symptoms displayed in vignettes was associated with participants, indicating they would discourage expression of grief and distance themselves from the person grieving.