Abstract:
Grief after bereavement is sometimes thought to be a life-altering experience, of the kind one never truly recovers from. But recent results suggest that people who are bereaved typically grieve for relatively short periods, with as many as half returning to baseline within several months. In this talk, I look at a broad range of evidence, from neuroscience results to bereavement narratives, to consider how grief changes over time. Focusing on the emotion of sadness in particular, I propose that for typical subjects, the capacity for sadness in light of a bereavement does not end but remains intact indefinitely. This is so even though this sadness is typically triggered more rarely over time and, when triggered, weaker in felt intensity. At the same time, when triggered, this sadness continues to say that the loved ones absence is profoundly bad, not merely moderately or mildly bad. This is an example of what I dub an emotional constancy effect, wherein two emotions of different felt intensities can nevertheless say the same thing.
Bio: Dr. Grace Helton