Evaluations of hypothetical bereavement and grief: The influence of loss recency, loss type and gender

Abstract

Individuals often hold strict and erroneous expectations for how others should grieve, yet this issue has been sparsely researched. A total of 161 undergraduates rated the appropriateness of various social and emotional behaviours of a hypothetical bereaved individual as a function of the recency of the death (1 month or 1 year ago), the nature of the loss (death of a spouse or child) and the gender of the bereaved. As expected, subjects deemed it inappropriate to show positive emotions and experiences 1 month after a hypothetical death and more inappropriate to show negative reactions 1 year later and there were generally higher expectations of socially appropriate behaviour for those who lost a child rather than a spouse. Unexpectedly, there were no significant differences regarding the gender of the bereaved. This study is among the first to show experimentally the widespread expectation that grief should be experienced early and be short-lived.

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

“…In addition, the current study’s results are limited to attributes of spousal bereavement as spousal loss may produce differences in social attributions compared with other types of losses. Other studies have found that loss of a child was less negatively judged than loss of a spouse (e.g., Miller, 2015).…”

“…Women are more likely to use emotion-focused coping (Bennett et al., 2010) and may be judged as interpersonally attractive if high-intensity grief is expressed after the death of a loved one (Kubitz et al., 1989). Despite studies indicating gender differences in grief expression and coping after a loss, recent studies have found that social expectancies for male and female grievers are the same (Miller, 2015; Penman et al., 2014). However, raters indicated that they would be more likely to interact with a bereaved woman regardless of type of death (stroke or car crash) than a bereaved man (Penman et al., 2014).…”

“…In an international sample using vignettes, grief was expected to occur early in the loss (2 weeks) and then decrease relatively quickly (6 months), with significant differences in grief expectations soon after a loss compared with 15 months after a loss; however, social distance preferences did not change based on length of time since death (Penman, Breen, Hewitt, & Prigerson, 2014). These findings were supported both in an Australian community sample, which found expectations that grief should be expressed not avoided, social support is important for recovery (despite evidence that support relationships often deteriorate after a loss, e.g., Breen & O’Connor, 2011), and grieving too long is maladaptive (Costa et al., 2007), and in a vignette study with college students, where grievers expressing positive emotion 1 month after the loss were rated negatively and 1 year after the loss were rated as having inappropriate negative emotions (Miller, 2015). Research suggests that intense grief reactions that last more than 6 months tend to persist (e.g., Bonanno et al., 2004; Simon et al., 2011).…”

Cognitive appraisal of exposure to specific types of trauma - a study of gender differences

“…Other studies significantly support that sex differences related to types of traumatic exposure influence posttraumatic coping [ 10 , 12 , 43 – 46 ]; however, events assessed in those studies – sexual abuse [ 6 , 7 , 9 ], domestic violence [ 10 ], exposure to war [ 17 – 20 ] or disasters [ 21 , 44 , 47 ] – not only are different than those considered in our sample, but also carry a specific quantitative (different rates in men and women) and qualitative posttraumatic impact (certain types of traumatic events carry different meanings in men versus women) [ 2 , 4 , 5 ].…”