Exploring the role of empathy in prolonged grief reactions to bereavement.

ABSTRACT: Grief reactions to the bereavement of a close individual could involve empathy for pain, which is fundamental to social interaction. To explore whether grief symptoms interact with social relatedness to a person to whom one directs empathy to modulate the expression of empathy, we administered an empathy task to 28 bereaved adults during functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which participants were subliminally primed with facial stimuli (e.g., faces of their deceased or living relative, or a stranger), each immediately followed by a visual pain stimulus. Individuals' grief severity promoted empathy for the pain stimulus primed with the deceased's face, while it diminished the neural response to the pain stimulus primed with the face of either their living relative or a stranger in the

SUBMITTER: Yoshiike T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10172345 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature