TY - JOUR
T1 - Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center
AU - O'Connor, Mary Frances
AU - Wellisch, David K.
AU - Stanton, Annette L.
AU - Eisenberger, Naomi I.
AU - Irwin, Michael R.
AU - Lieberman, Matthew D.
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the UCLA Brain Mapping Center for their assistance. This research was supported by funds from the California Breast Cancer Research Program Grant Number 10IB-0048. This work was also supported in part by grant T32-MH19925, the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and the Friends of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
PY - 2008/8/15
Y1 - 2008/8/15
N2 - Complicated Grief (CG) occurs when an individual experiences prolonged, unabated grief. The neural mechanisms distinguishing CG from Noncomplicated Grief (NCG) are unclear, but hypothesized mechanisms include both pain-related activity (related to the social pain of loss) and reward-related activity (related to attachment behavior). Bereaved women (11 CG, 12 NCG) participated in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, during grief elicitation with idiographic stimuli. Analyses revealed that whereas both CG and NCG participants showed pain-related neural activity in response to reminders of the deceased, only those with CG showed reward-related activity in the nucleus accumbens (NA). This NA cluster was positively correlated with self-reported yearning, but not with time since death, participant age, or positive/negative affect. This study supports the hypothesis that attachment activates reward pathways. For those with CG, reminders of the deceased still activate neural reward activity, which may interfere with adapting to the loss in the present.
AB - Complicated Grief (CG) occurs when an individual experiences prolonged, unabated grief. The neural mechanisms distinguishing CG from Noncomplicated Grief (NCG) are unclear, but hypothesized mechanisms include both pain-related activity (related to the social pain of loss) and reward-related activity (related to attachment behavior). Bereaved women (11 CG, 12 NCG) participated in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, during grief elicitation with idiographic stimuli. Analyses revealed that whereas both CG and NCG participants showed pain-related neural activity in response to reminders of the deceased, only those with CG showed reward-related activity in the nucleus accumbens (NA). This NA cluster was positively correlated with self-reported yearning, but not with time since death, participant age, or positive/negative affect. This study supports the hypothesis that attachment activates reward pathways. For those with CG, reminders of the deceased still activate neural reward activity, which may interfere with adapting to the loss in the present.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.04.256
DO - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.04.256
M3 - Article
C2 - 18559294
AN - SCOPUS:47949113985
SN - 1053-8119
VL - 42
SP - 969
EP - 972
JO - NeuroImage
JF - NeuroImage
IS - 2
ER -