Exploring the Role of Empathy in Prolonged Grief Reactions to Bereavement

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2023 May 10

PMID 37165097

Authors

Takuya Yoshiike

Francesco Benedetti

Yoshiya Moriguchi

Benedetta Vai

Veronica Aggio

Keiko Asano

Masaya Ito

Hiroki Ikeda

Hidefumi Ohmura

Motoyasu Honma

Naoto Yamada

Yoshiharu Kim

Satomi Nakajima

Kenichi Kuriyama

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

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 medial frontal cortex (e.g., the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex). Moreover, preliminary analyses showed that while the behavioral empathic response was promoted by the component of "longing" in the deceased priming condition, the neural empathic response was diminished by the component of "avoidance" in the stranger priming condition. Our results suggest an association between grief reactions to bereavement and empathy, in which grief symptoms interact with interpersonal factors to promote or diminish empathic responses to others' pain.

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