(Press-News.org) Among life's many tragedies, the death of a child is one that is perhaps the greatest for parents. No matter what the age of the child or the cause of death, the irrefutable fact of the loss is one that shatters the normal cycle of life, leaving parents traumatized and often incapacitated by grief.
Research on coping with bereavement has focused primarily on the individual, despite the fact that family and married relationships are all profoundly disrupted by the loss. But in the wealth of studies about parental grief, little attention has been paid to precisely how couples relate to each other as they struggle to come to terms with the death of a child.
A new research article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, addresses this gap in bereavement research by focusing on the way that couples together process the grief of losing a child.
"Scientific literature focused on individual rather than interdependent processes in coping with bereavement, despite the fact that bereaved people do not grieve alone and the way one person grieves likely influences another," says psychological scientist Margaret Stroebe, who conducted the research with her colleagues at the Utrecht University and VU University Amsterdam.
In this study, the researchers interviewed 219 couples that had lost a child. The parents were from 26 to 68 years old, and the causes of their children's death ranged from stillbirth, to illness, accident, SIDS, suicide or homicide. They were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements like "I stay strong for my partner," "I hide my feelings for the sake of my partner," or "I try to spare my partner's feelings." The researchers collected the data at three different timepoints: six, thirteen and twenty months after the loss.
These questions examined a phenomenon they referred to as Partner-Oriented Self-Regulation (POSR), which captures the way in which couples either avoided discussion of their loss or attempted to remain strong for the sake of the partner. Many husbands and wives believe that these two strategies help to alleviate grief, but Stroebe and her colleagues found that the strategies actually exacerbated the problems of grieving. They found that POSR was not only associated with an increase in the person's own grief but also with an increase in the partner's grief. Moreover, these relationships persisted over time.
There is a paradox, Stroebe says, "While parents seek to protect their partners through POSR, this effort has the opposite effect, and it is associated with worse adjustment over time. Surprisingly, our results suggest hat POSR has costs, not benefits, and not only for the partner but also for the self."
These surprising results may be explained by the role of self-regulation in the grieving process. Our ability to self-regulate is essential for dealing with the world, but exerting excessive efforts to contain our emotions and regulate our feelings, thoughts, and behavior exact important interpersonal and individual costs. Like a muscle that becomes exhausted after exertion, too much self-regulation actually depletes our ability to self-regulate in various domains including physical health and goal accomplishment.
Ultimately, these attempts at self-regulation may prevent partners from coping with the loss of their child. Suppressing emotions can have adverse effects on grief between couples. One partner may think that painful feelings aren't accepted, for example, or a partner might misinterpret no apparent grief as a lack of actual grief.
"One important implication of this research is that, in cases where professional help is indicated, clinicians can — when appropriate — guide bereaved clients away from POSR and toward sharing their grief, thereby easing their suffering," Stroebe says.
###
For more information about this study, please contact: Margaret Stroebe at m.s.stroebe@uu.nl.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Partner-Oriented Self-Regulation Among Bereaved Parents: The Costs of Holding in Grief for the Partner's Sake" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.
Being stoic for the spouse's sake comes at a high cost
2013-02-20
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Study: Resveratrol shows promise to protect hearing, cognition
2013-02-20
DETROIT – Resveratrol, a substance found in red grapes and red wine, may have the potential to protect against hearing and cognitive decline, according to a published laboratory study from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
The study shows that healthy rats are less likely to suffer the long-term effects of noise-induced hearing loss when given resveratrol before being exposed to loud noise for a long period of time.
"Our latest study focuses on resveratrol and its effect on bioinflammation, the body's response to injury and something that is believed to be the cause of ...
Children with brain lesions able to use gestures important to language learning
2013-02-20
ATLANTA – Children with brain lesions suffered before or around the time of birth are able to use gestures – an important aspect of the language learning process– to convey simple sentences, a Georgia State University researcher has found.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, assistant professor of psychology, and fellow researchers at the University of Chicago, looked at children who suffered lesions to one side of the brain to see whether they used gestures similar to typically developing children. She examined gestures such as pointing to a cookie while saying "eat" to ...
The ethics of access: Comparing 2 federal health care reform efforts
2013-02-20
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Two major health reform laws, enacted 25 years apart, both try to meet an ethical standard to provide broad access to basic health care. Neither quite gets there -- but it's not too late for modern health care reform to bring the nation closer to a goal of comprehensive and coordinated care for all.
That's the conclusion of a commentary published in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by a team of University of Michigan Health System physicians.
The authors – a family physician, an emergency physician and a primary care ...
Smoking cessation in old age: Less heart attacks and strokes within 5 years
2013-02-20
Professor Hermann Brenner and colleagues analyzed the data of 8.807 individuals aged between 50 and 74 years using data of Saarland citizens. "We were able to show that the risk of smokers for cardiovascular diseases is more than twice that of non-smokers. However, former smokers are affected at almost the same low rate as people of the same age who never smoked," says Brenner. "Moreover, smokers are affected at a significantly younger age than individuals who have never smoked or have stopped smoking." For example, a 60-year-old smoker has the same risk of myocardial infarction ...
Setting the record straight on Medicare's overhead costs: New study
2013-02-20
The traditional Medicare program allocates only 1 percent of total spending to overhead compared with 6 percent when the privatized portion of Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, is included, according to a study in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.
The 1 percent figure includes all types of non-medical spending by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plus other federal agencies, such as the IRS, that support the Medicare program, and is based on data contained in the latest report of the Medicare trustees. The 6 percent ...
MIT researchers build Quad HD TV chip
2013-02-20
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- It took only a few years for high-definition televisions to make the transition from high-priced novelty to ubiquitous commodity — and they now seem to be heading for obsolescence just as quickly. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new ultrahigh-definition, or UHD, models (also known as 4K or Quad HD) with four times the resolution of today's HD TVs.
In addition to screens with four times the pixels, however, UHD also requires a new video-coding standard, known as high-efficiency video coding, or HEVC. Also ...
Gains made towards treatment of rare bone disease
2013-02-20
This press release is available in French.
Diagnosed in toddlers, X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH) is the most common form of heritable rickets, in which soft bones bend and deform, and tooth abscesses develop because infections penetrate soft teeth that are not properly calcified. Researchers at McGill University and the Federal University of Sao Paulo have identified that osteopontin, a major bone and tooth substrate protein, plays a role in XLH. Their discovery may pave the way to effectively treating this rare disease.
The findings were made by the laboratories ...
Searching for the solar system's chemical recipe
2013-02-20
By studying the origins of different isotope ratios among the elements that make up today's smorgasbord of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and interplanetary ice and dust, Mark Thiemens and his colleagues hope to learn how our solar system evolved. Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, has worked on this problem for over three decades.
In recent years his team has found the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ...
Handheld device for detecting counterfeit and substandard medicines tested by PQM
2013-02-20
Rockville, Md., February 13, 2013 – With substandard and counterfeit medicines a dangerous and growing problem in the developing world and elsewhere, identifying new technologies to detect such drugs is an urgent matter. In a new study published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, scientists from the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) evaluated a handheld Raman device's potential to detect counterfeit and substandard medicines. The device, called TruScan®, is currently used to test Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) and finished pharmaceutical ...
Mushroom-supplemented soybean extract shows therapeutic promise for advanced prostate cancer
2013-02-20
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — A natural, nontoxic product called genistein-combined polysaccharide, or GCP, which is commercially available in health stores, could help lengthen the life expectancy of certain prostate cancer patients, UC Davis researchers have found.
Paramita GhoshMen with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, known as metastatic cancer, and who have had their testosterone lowered with drug therapy are most likely to benefit. The study, recently published in Endocrine-Related Cancer, was conducted in prostate cancer cells and in mice.
Lowering ...