The Nature of Grief: Implications for the Neurobiology of Emotion

This paper explores the limitations of neurobiological approaches to human emotional experience, focusing on the case of grief. We propose that grief is neither an episodic emotion nor a longer-term mood but instead a heterogeneous, temporally extended process. A grief process can incorporate all manner of experiences, thoughts, and activities, most or all of which are not grief-specific. Furthermore, its course over time is shaped in various different ways by interpersonal, social, and cultural environments. This poses methodological challenges for any attempt to relate grief to the brain. Grief also illustrates wider limitations of approaches that conceive of emotions as brief episodes, abstracted from the dynamic, holistic, longer-term organization of human emotional life.