Personalized fMRI tasks for grief severity in bereaved individuals: Emotional counting Stroop and grief elicitation protocols. Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging 2024 Dec;345:111902
Date
09/16/2024Pubmed ID
39278199DOI
10.1016/j.pscychresns.2024.111902Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85203819568 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 3 CitationsAbstract
Approximately 7-10% of people experiencing bereavement following a death develop prolonged grief disorder, a psychiatric disorder included in the DSM-5-TR. Prolonged grief disorder encompasses core symptoms of intense yearning/longing for and preoccupation with thoughts or memories of the deceased person experienced to a clinically significant degree for at least the last month, other key associated symptoms (e.g., avoidance, emotional pain), and the death must have occurred at least one year prior to diagnosis. Extant research has shown a relationship between activation in the reward pathway (e.g., nucleus accumbens) and grief severity. To date, functional MRI studies have primarily utilized the Emotional Counting Stroop task (ecStroop) and the Grief Elicitation task to explore these relationships. However, these prior studies are not without limitations, including small sample sizes and absence of a unified task protocol, hindering meaningful comparisons between studies. This protocol paper describes the ecStroop task and the Grief Elicitation task, which will be vital for facilitating multisite studies and enabling comparisons across studies. This will aid to advance the field by identifying neurophysiological measures that may, in the future, serve as potential biomarkers of prolonged grief disorder.
Author List
Singer J, Goveas JS, Elliott L, Parmar H, Mary-Frances OAuthor
Joseph S. Goveas MBBS, MD Professor in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AdultBereavement
Brain
Emotions
Female
Grief
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Stroop Test
