Why Some People Don't Grieve (cont'd)
By Carolyn Campbell
Q: Is there a reason for that?
A: Men show more grief initially, men grieve more severely. I don't think any of the ideas have held up well, but a few people early on argued that a woman had more social support network and men concentrated their social support in their wife. When their wife died, they grieved more because they lost their support, so they would go find someone else to fill that void. I don't think that's held up really, but it's not easy to measure these things. I'm cautious in making that statement because I don't really know if that's true or not. It may be culture bound.
Q: You have studied bereavement both in the United States and in China. Are there any notable cultural differences you've found in terms of grieving?
A: Americans grieve the loss of a child very severely; they grieve much more profoundly when they lose a child than when they lose a spouse. That's been shown in a few studies and we found that in our study, but the Chinese didn't do that. They grieved the loss of the spouse and the loss of a child the same. So there are cultural differences.
Q: What would you suggest to a friend trying to support someone who is grieving?
A: What I suggest is to be available to them socially. People who lose a loved one often have to find new things to do. They, to some extent, look for new pieces of identity. Often when we lose someone close, we lose a large part of our social world.
Q: What about talking to friends about their loss?
A: I think it's very important to let the person talk about the loss at their own pace; if they don't want to, you don't need to bring it up. And I feel very strongly about this based on our research. We've published a couple of the only papers done on laughter during bereavement, and we found that people laugh and smile a lot when they talk about their losses, early on even. We are able to measure genuine laughter from polite laughter because we measure facial expressions — these muscles around the eyes will only contract when we have genuine positive emotion, and it's very difficult to do that voluntarily. We found that people did it a lot, and that it had enormous social benefits. People who laughed more had better relations with people. We showed films to observers, and they felt better about the bereaved people when they laughed. From this, we kind of speculated a bit, but it's OK to laugh, it's OK to forget and just have fun. We have this cultural idea that somehow we're not supposed to be doing that. I think that's what friends can do — get out and have fun, get a break and allow the luxury of talking about it when they want to. We did a questionnaire where we asked people to tell us how much they think about their loss, express their pain, and think about it in three different contexts. We found that they did the least grief work with friends, and I think this really speaks to this issue. Good friends are people you might want to talk about things with, but you also want to be with them because they're alive — they're people you're still connected to. So you don't want that relationship to be heavy and tense all the time. I think most people feel they need to be serious around bereaved people, but bereaved people report actually that that's not really helpful to them.
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