Commonalities in grief responding across bereavement and non-bereavement losses.

BACKGROUND: Despite implications for theory and treatment, commonality in responding to non-bereavement and bereavement losses are not well explicated.

METHOD: This study identified the factor structure of the three most common responses to bereavement, prolonged grief, posttraumatic stress, and major depression in a bereaved community sample (n=151, 59% female, 68% white) from the U.S. recruited from Amazon's MTurk using a cross-sectional survey design, then cross-validated the structure in samples where people had lost other potentially self-defining roles; one's employment (n=157, 47% female, 69% white) and one's marriage (n=116, 62% female, 80% white).

RESULTS: Results indicated that symptoms of prolonged grief, posttraumatic stress, and major depression were distinct factors in the bereaved sample, the three-factor solution was a good fit for the job-loss and divorce samples, and levels of grief in each sample appeared to be best predicted by time since loss and centrality of the loss to one's identity.

LIMITATIONS: Limitations include potential sample bias due to convenience sampling, and the cross-sectional design did not allow examination of the stability of factors over time.

CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that grief is not a unique response to loss of loved one but instead may be a common phenomenology across types of loss. This implies that facilitating meaningful engagement in self-defining activities that compensate for the disrupting loss might be efficacious in promoting grief resolution without the need for working through individuals' emotional attachment to a specific individual or processing one's emotional responses to the loss.