The developmental stage of emerging adulthood often poses substantial challenges that negatively impact bereavement experiences (Schultz, 2007; Tanner & Arnett, 2009). Some emerging adults may be even more at risk for adverse grief outcomes due to individual differences such as gender and ethnicity, but very few studies have investigated these variables within the population. We addressed this gap in the literature by investigating the influence of gender and ethnicity on college students’ bereavement experiences using the Hogan Grief Reaction Checklist (HGRC; Hogan, Greenfield, & Schmidt, 2001) Results indicates a significant relationship between ethnicity and levels of personal growth, use of religious coping, and type of loss. The present study found no clinically significant differences in male and female college student bereavement characteristics.

The current study used a three-phase mixed-methods design to produce a new self-report measure of the strategies that college students use to cope with the death of a loved-one. College students are commonly bereaved and may be in the process of undergoing important developmental tasks related to emerging adulthood. However, the application of grief-specific stress-and-coping theories (i.e., the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement) to this population has been hampered by measurement issues. The current study aimed to address the flaws asserted above through the use of a mixed-methods scale development design. To this end, the researcher made use of the discussion component of a bereavement-focused special topics course to refine a focus-group facilitation guide and generate a preliminary list of content domains. In Study 1, three bereaved students participated in a formal focus-group. Three graduate-level bereavement researchers drew from the qualitative data available from the Pilot Study and Study 1 to develop a pool of 192 items for use in quantitative analysis. In Study 2, these items were administered to a sample of 700 bereaved undergraduates. Exploratory and Confirmatory factor analyses suggested that a 5-factor model was the best fit for the data. Results suggest that bereaved students use a variety of strategies when coping with bereavement, including using drugs and alcohol, seeking support from others, accessing religious faith, exploring new relationships and identities, and experiencing depression symptoms. Preliminary support was provided for the validity of a 26-item coping strategies measure with five subscales named the GCOPE.

There has been growing support for the idea that complicated grief symptoms following bereavement are independent of symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, the loss of a loved one is not the only or the most frequent type of loss to be encountered. The onset of an insidious medical illness may trigger a mourning process for the lost function or body part that is posited to also involve feelings of grief. While the risk of depression is high among a medical or rehabilitative population, the impact of grief over functional losses has never been empirically investigated as a contributing factor in the patient's emotional and physical functioning following illness. Currently, many assume that grief and depression are part of the same condition within the medical context. However, it may be that symptoms conceptualized as grief in the bereavement literature can be identified and distinguished from depressive symptoms within a medically ill population.The aims of the current study were to: (1) investigate the reliability and validity of the Loss Inventory (Niemeier, Kennedy, McKinley, & Cifu, 2004), a newly-developed measure used to assess intrapersonal grief, (2) explore the relationship between grief and depression, and their distinction from one another, using principal components analysis among their respective symptom items, and (3) examine the unique and added contribution of grief on concurrent and prospective emotional and physical health outcomes (i.e. self-esteem, intrusive thoughts and avoidant behavior, global well-being, sleep quality, state anxiety, activities of daily living, and number/severity of co-morbid illnesses).Two hundred and ten Parkinson's disease and Essential Tremor patients recruited from a VAMC Hospital completed questionnaires at baseline and five to six months later. The Loss Inventory proved to be a reliable and a valid measure of intrapersonal grief. Principal components analysis supported the distinction between intrapersonal grief and depression symptoms as measured by symptoms from the Loss Inventory and Zung SDS. Finally, grief symptoms significantly predicted several concurrent and prospective emotional and physical health outcomes after controlling for disease stage, disability, and depression. In sum, the present findings lend support to the hypothesis that bereavement-related symptoms can occur and are meaningful after functional losses from medical illness.

Bereavement is an important research area as it can result in grief reactions that lead to serious psychological and health consequences, particularly for the at-risk group of emerging adults (Arnett, 2000; Balk, Walker, & Baker, 2010; Fisher, Murray, & Frazer, 1985; Stroebe, Schut, & Stroebe, 2007). Expressive writing is a well-researched intervention for trauma and adjustment, yet research repeatedly has revealed null results with the classic Pennebaker paradigm as a bereavement intervention (Stroebe et al., 2002; Stroebe, Schut, & Stroebe, 2006). It may be premature, however, to conclude expressive writing is ineffective for the bereaved due to limitations in extant research. For example, Pennebaker’s paradigm is based on the premise that participants freely choose the stressful topic to write about, whereas expressive writing bereavement studies have required participants to write about their loss (Collison & Gramling, manuscript in preparation). The present study reports on data from a larger study (Konig, Eonta, Dyal, & Vrana, 2014; N=246) that assessed psychological and physiological outcomes in college students who wrote about a traumatic stressor using Pennebaker’s paradigm. This provided the opportunity to rigorously test it with bereavement and compare death loss to other forms of trauma. Analyses examined the impact of expressive writing with the bereaved who freely identified death loss as the traumatic stressor (n=69) and were randomly assigned to either emotional disclosure or control writing on outcome measures of physical symptoms (PILL), event-related distress (DTS), and depression (CES-D). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis, 1997) and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Campbell & Pennebaker, 2003) results were also used to compare these groups. Exploratory analyses investigated potential differences between the bereaved and those who endorsed a non-bereavement trauma (“other trauma”; n=71) using outcome measures and text analytic techniques (i.e., PILL, DTS, CES-D; LIWC, LSA). Results were consistent with findings from previous expressive writing studies with the bereaved, in that the intervention resulted in no detectable benefits when compared with control writing. No remarkable differences between the bereaved and “other trauma” participants emerged. Researchers’ time may be better spent examining more clinically relevant writing exercises for bereavement interventions.

Inspired by Walt Whitman's "A Song of Myself," this collection of poetry explores a narrative of the American Dream and intergenerational grief through a queered self.

This collection of short stories follows Liz Yoo, a Korean-American woman, who struggles to connect to her immigrant parents and understand her identity.

A book of poems composed of an alternating lyric sequence entitled, "Heroin," and other poems.

ABSTRACT The largest part of this thesis is a novel called Still Life, which explores the mourning process of a mother who loses her baby, and the effect it has on her life and her marriage. The novel alternates between the present and the past (which is 23 years before) so that it illustrates the mother’s reaction to the death of her baby at the time of the death, and her personal development (or lack thereof) many years on.The second part of the thesis is an essay, which reflects on grieving in general and the expression of grief through literature, as well as some of the aspects of the writing process, with particular consideration given to the development of plot,the choice of point-of-view, symbolism, the ending and the choice of writing in a second language.

The mediated closeness experienced by social media users is built on the ongoing accumulation of personal information by corporate owned social media platforms. Each user’s digital footprint becomes more intricate as this collection continues across their life’s procession, leaving something behind after they die. Social media platforms have become intimately insinuated into life and finally, into death. These haphazard archives were never created with death or grief in mind. But users die, and their friends and family use social media to grieve; death isn’t something a platform or its users can avoid. This thesis examines the ways that death and grief are experienced and how social media is facilitating and changing that process. The study approaches social media and death historically, discursively, and economically. It discusses the history of mediated death, the experience of grief over social media, and the political economy of the socially mediated dead.

Trata-se de estudar a noção de experiência (Erfahrung) para compreender os relatos de análise e estudar os relatos para compreender a noção de experiência. Nossa tese sugere que a experiência em psicanálise apresenta-se sob o signo negativo, relacionado com o luto de um objeto perdido ou o inapreensível de um evento traumático, bem como pelo signo positivo de um acontecimento de elaboração ou reconstrução. Observamos como a noção de experiência se articula ao conceito de objeto, em sua característica de perda, como também em relação à experiência de um saber. A dificuldade de se dizer o que é uma experiência a coloca lado a lado com o conceito de Real, que traz em si o impedimento de que falemos direta e positivamente acerca dele. Este aspecto subjetivo e constitutivo da perda chamamos de experiências de perda, e o campo social da perda, os conflitos com a civilização, as ambiguidades com o outro, chamamos de perda da experiência. A perda da experiência do sujeito moderno produz um sujeito capaz do encontro com o novo, que a era moderna começou a oferecer. Ele não é nem tão forte que não possa ser transformado, nem tão fraco que não possa ser autêntico. É assim que tornamos a experiência um sucedâneo da transformação. Diante dessa via de mão dupla entre as experiências de perda (perda de si, perda de objeto) e a perda da experiência do sujeito moderno encontramos nossa hipótese de pesquisa: A noção de experiência em psicanálise se relaciona à perda de objeto e antes mesmo de haver a perda de experiência houve a experiência de perda. Compreendemos a escrita como mediadora entre estas duas experiências de perda. Esta parte da pesquisa nomeamos de experiência sensível. Percorremos os teóricos do pragmatismo, da filosofia crítica alemã e alguns pensadores estruturalistas franceses, considerados desde o ponto de vista da relação entre suas ideias e suas experiências pessoais de luto / The purpose is to study the notion of experience (Erfahrung) to understand the accounts of analysis and study them to understand the notion of experience. Our thesis suggests that experience in psychoanalysis is a negative sign, related to grief, to a lost object or to what is unintelligible in a traumatic event, but it also is as a positive sign of construction and reconstruction. The difficulty in defining what an experience is aligns it with the concept of what is Real, which places a barrier against our direct and positive statement about it. We call this subjective and constitutive aspect of loss experiences of loss, and we call the social scope of loss, the conflicts with civilization, the ambiguities with the other, loss of experience. The loss of experience of the modern subject creates a subject capable of meeting the other, something which the modern age began. The subject is not strong enough to become incapable of being transformed, or weak enough to become incapable of being real. This is how we make experience a substitute for transformation. In view of this two-way street between experiences of loss (loss of oneself, loss of the object), and the loss of experience of the modern subject, we came to our assumption of research: the notion of experience in psychoanalysis is related to the loss of the object, and before there even is the loss of experience there is the experience of loss. We understand writing as the mediator between these two configurations of loss. We called this part of the research related to writing sensitive experience. We studied the theorists of pragmatism, of the German critical philosophy and a few French structuralists, taken into account from the perspective of the relationship between their ideas and personal experiences of grief. At the end of the research, we extracted three accounts of analyses, which are related to what is real in experience, especially regarding the persistence in not writing