Professionals working with college students will benefit from using a nuanced approach to assessing students' online behavior, including an assessment of underlying motives for use.

This study identifies grief management strategies that bereaved adults evaluate as more and less helpful, assesses whether the person centeredness of these strategies explains their helpfulness, and determines whether strategy helpfulness varies as a function of demographic, personality, and situational factors. Participants (105 bereaved young adults) assessed the helpfulness of 16 grief management strategies; these strategies were coded for their degree of person centeredness. Strategy person centeredness was strongly correlated with helpfulness. Strategy helpfulness varied as a function of participant gender and the disruptiveness of the decedent's death, but not as a function of need for cognition or decedent closeness.

Bereaved adolescents (N = 90) who had experienced relatively common death losses (e.g., grandparent, friend) completed the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief and the Emotional Closeness Scale and Continuum. Results indicated that present grief was significantly higher for friend than for grandparent death loss. A MANOVA revealed that those in the high closeness group reported significantly higher mean scores on past and present grief than those in the low closeness group. Finally, in a hierarchal multiple regression, after demographic variables were entered (e.g., age, present at death), emotional closeness added significant variance to the prediction of past and present grief. This research contributes to the understanding of grief intensity following adolescents' most common death losses and highlights the importance of counselors' intentionally and directly assessing bereaved adolescents' perceived emotional closeness to the deceased as part of grief-related counseling.

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Abstract:In this review article, the authors integrate the theoretical, empirical, and clinical literature relevant to the phenomenon of college student bereavement. They synthesize information on two theories of mourning that appear to fit well with the experience of bereaved college students with information about the developmental, cohort, and contextual situation of college students. They end the article with an integrated illustration and practical recommendations for counseling psychologists who work with bereaved college students in various capacities within higher education (e.g., administrators, clinicians, educators, and researchers). academia | college students | counseling centers | well-being | bereavement | college Keywords: student bereavement | counseling psychologists | counseling psychology | higher education counselors Article:Research suggests that approximately 25% to 30% of college students are in the 1st year of bereavement and that between 40% and 50% are within the first 2 years of experiencing the death of a family member or friend (Balk & Walker, 2008;Hardison, Neimeyer, & Lichstein, 2005;Noppe, Linzmeier, Martin, Wisneski, & Servaty-Seib, 2008). The purpose of the present article is to provide counseling psychologists with information that will assist them in addressing the specific developmental needs of bereaved college students. We begin with a brief argument for why we believe counseling psychologists are uniquely positioned to positively affect the grief experiences of this population. Next, the core of the article is a conceptual synthesis of two current mourning theories with the distinct developmental, cohort, and contextual issues faced by college students. Finally, the article ends with an integrated illustration and practical recommendations for best practices. We believe that learning more about the theoretical, empirical, and clinical literature relevant to the experience of bereavement for college students