The relationship between social acknowledgment and prolonged grief symptoms: a multiple mediation effect of beliefs about the goodness and controllability of grief-related emotions

A case report to understand the use of an evidence-based approach of prolonged grief therapy in Chinese culture

Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a new diagnosis that may cause significant functional impairment. Prolonged grief therapy (PGT) is a manualized 16-session intervention, whose efficacy has been demonstrated in studies primarily from Western cultures. The current report aimed to present a case to illustrate the use of PGT in Chinese culture. The client was a bereaved adult suffering from PGD after the death of her mother ten years ago. Additionally, she lost her father three months ago. Questionnaires were completed before and after treatment. In-depth interview was conducted at a 3-month follow-up. The client's scores for grief, functional impairment, grief-related beliefs and avoidance, depression and insomnia all decreased substantially after treatment. The follow-up feedbacks indicated that the beneficial effects of PGT persisted in the client's life. This case report provides preliminary evidence that bereaved people in China could benefit greatly from PGT, with minimal cultural adaptation.

Prolonged Grief Disorder: Addressing Misconceptions With Evidence

There are many misconceptions about Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). We show with data that PGD is a diagnosis that applies to a rare few of mourners who are at risk of significant distress and dysfunction. Those mourners who meet criteria for PGD have been shown to benefit from specialized, targeted treatment for it. The case against PGD is empirically unsubstantiated, and the need for scientific examination of effective treatments is warranted.

Emotion beliefs: conceptual review and compendium

Laypeople hold richly divergent beliefs about emotion, and these beliefs are consequential. Specific forms of belief that have been investigated include the usefulness, contagiousness, duration, dependence upon intersubjective experience, cognitively mediated properties, malleability, and hindering properties of emotion, just to name a few. Progress in this emerging sub-field of research has been hampered by the lack of a widely accepted definition of emotion belief able to capture all of these dimensions. Correspondingly, there has been a proliferation of different terminologies, constructs, and measures. The present review aims to address these obstacles by defining emotion belief, and subsequently re-considering existing constructs and measures that align with this definition. The latter is presented in the form of a comprehensive compendium of 21 different constructs and associated self-report measures that assess varying components of one's beliefs about emotions in general and/or about their own emotions, and an additional 5 scales that were designed to measure one's beliefs about another's emotions. From the more unified conceptualization of emotion belief presented here, critical areas of future research are highlighted.