The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

letting our thoughts run through our mind again and again may be a way to distract ourselves from the painful feelings of grief. Thinking about the loss and the consequences of the loss might actually be a way to avoid feeling the loss. She and her colleagues called this the rumination as avoidance hypothesis.4 This may sound pretty far-fetched initially, but luckily this careful research team did empirical studies to investigate. Let me tell you how. When something is very difficult to measure, scientists develop special techniques to measure it—that was the basis for the microscope and the telescope. Avoidance is a difficult thing to measure. Although we can ask people how much time they spend ruminating, or what they ruminate about, it does not make sense to ask people outright about avoidance. If the brain’s motivation for avoidance is not to notice what one is feeling, then avoidance itself as a process probably would not be noticed either. Special measurement techniques in the laboratory, however, allow psychologists to study automatic responses, responses too quick to be deliberate. These decisions are made by the brain very quickly. One method uses reaction time and the other uses eye tracking—responses that happen approximately as quickly as one heartbeat. In order to test the rumination as avoidance hypothesis, Stroebe and her colleagues invited bereaved people to come to the laboratory and participate in these avoidance measurements. They thought using the pictu...