Is Mourning Rewarding? (revisited)

Can we reduce the persistent, unbearable pain of losing a loved one to 15-20 voxels of brain activity in the nucleus accumbens (O ' Connor et al., 2008)? No? Then what if I told you that unrelenting grief — and associated feelings of sheer panic, fear, terminal aloneness, and existential crisis — isn ' t “suffering”. It ' s actually rewarding!Well I ' m here to tell you that it isn ' t.Looking back on apost from 2011, you never realize it ' s going to be you.1The top figure shows that activity in thenucleus accumbens was greater in response to grief-related words vs. neutral words in a group of 11 women with “Complicated” Grief (who lost a mother or sister to breast cancer in the last 5 years), compared to a group of 10 women with garden-variety Non-complicated Grief (O ' Connor et al., 2008). Since the paper was published in 2008, and the standards for conducting fMRI studies havechanged (larger sample sizes are necessary, no more “voodoo correlations”), I won ' t go on about that here.When Grief Gets Complicated?Grief is never simple, it ' salways complicated. The death of a cherished loved one can create a situation that seems totally intolerable. Almost everyone agrees that navigating such loss doesn ' t rely on one acceptable road map. Yet here it is. Normal people are supposed to move through aone year mourning period of “sorrow, numbness, and even guilt and anger. Gradually these feelings ease, and it ' s possible to accept loss and move forward. ” ...

Source: The Neurocritic - October 5, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs