Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center

Abstract

Complicated grief (CG) occurs when an individual experiences prolonged, unabated grief. The neural mechanisms distinguishing CG from noncomplicated grief (NCG) are unclear, but hypothesized mechanisms include both pain-related activity (related to the social pain of loss) and reward-related activity (related to attachment behavior). Bereaved women (11 CG, 12 NCG) participated in an eventrelated functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, during grief elicitation with idiographic stimuli. Analyses revealed that whereas both CG and NCG participants showed pain-related neural activity in response to reminders of the deceased, only those with CG showed reward-related activity in the nucleus accumbens (NA). This NA cluster was positively correlated with self-reported yearning, but not with time since death, participant age, or positive/negative affect. This study supports the hypothesis that attachment activates reward pathways. For those with CG, reminders of the deceased still activate neural reward activity, which may interfere with adapting to the loss in the present.

Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love

“…Last, in the context of loss and grief over the death of a beloved, O'Connor et al (2008) found that activity in the anterior nucleus accumbens, where we also found activation when our subjects viewed the rejecter relative to the neutral photograph, was correlated with self-reported yearning as an individual mourned the death of a mother or sister. The accumbens appears to be consistently involved in reward craving and motivational relevance under a variety of circumstances.…”

Neuropsychological Correlates of Complicated Grief in Older Spousally Bereaved Adults

“…In the ec-Stroop, the target word is printed between one and four times in a column, and instead of ink color being reported by the participant, the number of words is reported with a button press. A list of 73 grief-related words was developed from interviews with bereaved participants in prior research studies by the principal investigator (Gundel, O'Connor, Littrell, Fort, & Lane, 2003;O'Connor et al, 2008). each griefrelated word in the list was matched with a neutral word that had the same number of letters, the same number of syllables, the same part of speech, and the same frequency in the language.…”

Social Pain and the Brain: Controversies, Questions, and Where to Go from Here

“…Moreover, greater reports of social distress (feeling rejected, meaningless) were associated with greater activity in the dACC. Since that initial study, several other studies have shown that other forms of socially painful experience, such as experiencing the threat of negative social evaluation (Eisenberger et al 2011a, Takahashi et al 2009, Wager et al 2009), viewing rejection-related images (Kross et al 2007), reliving a romantic rejection (Fisher et al 2010, Kross et al 2011, or being reminded of a lost loved one (Gündel et al 2003, Kersting et al 2009, O'Connor et al 2008, activate these neural regions as well. In addition, one study demonstrated that participants showed overlapping neural activity in both affective (dACC, AI) and sensory (PI, S2) regions in response to a physical pain task and a social pain task (Kross et al 2011).…”