The effects of religion and social support on self-esteem and depression among the suddenly bereaved

Sherkat, Darren E.; Reed, Mark D.

doi:10.1007/bf00286562

Cited by 119 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…In some studies, church attendance has been associated with better bereavement outcomes [40][41][42], and yet results from other studies examining the benefits of spiritual social support imply that grievers do not always feel ministered to by their spiritual community. Richardson and Balaswamy [43] found for example that widowers who regularly attended church services had less positive and more negative affect than those who attended less regularly.…”

Section: Spiritual Copingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample

Neimeyer

Burke

2011

Religions

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Both grieving the loss of a loved one and using spirituality or religion as an aid in doing so are common behaviors in the wake of death. This longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors follows up on our earlier study that established the relation between positive and negative religious coping on the one hand and complicated grief (CG) on the other. In the current report, we broadened this focus to determine the relation between religious coping and other bereavement outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, to establish whether religious coping more strongly predicted bereavement distress or vice versa. We also sought to determine if the predictive power of CG in terms of religious coping over time exceeded that of PTSD and depression. Our results suggested a link between negative religious coping (NRC) and all forms of bereavement distress, whereas no such link was found between positive religious coping (PRC) and bereavement outcomes in our final analyses. Significantly, only CG prospectively predicted high levels of spiritual struggle six months later. Clinical implications regarding spiritually sensitive interventions are noted.

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Section: Spiritual Copingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample

Neimeyer

Burke

2011

Religions

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“…The most frequently studied rituals are those surrounding religion: people turn to prayer after negative life events such as September 11 th , for example, and prayer has been associated with improved coping (Ai, Tice, Peterson, & Huang, 2005;Pargament, 1997;Sherkat & Reed, 1992).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries.

Norton¹,

Gino

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

124

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Three experiments explored the impact of mourning rituals after losses -of loved ones, lovers, and lotteries -on mitigating grief. Participants who were directed to reflect on past rituals or who were assigned to complete novel rituals after experiencing losses reported lower levels of grief. Increased feelings of control after rituals mediated the link between use of rituals and reduced grief after losses, and the benefits of rituals accrued not only to individuals who professed a belief in rituals' effectiveness but also those who did not. Although the specific rituals in which people engage after losses vary widely by culture and religion -and among our participants -our results suggest a common psychological mechanism underlying their effectiveness: regained feelings of control.

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“…Likewise, grief has been described as the loss of an "assumptive world," in that the generalized sense of predictability and stability of the world has been challenged (Emmons, Colby, & Kaiser, 1998;Gilbert, 1997). Accordingly, clinical approaches have emphasized the need to help the survivor find meaning and a sense of purpose for both the deceased's life and his or her own life in order to regain a sense of well-being (Klass, 1999).Finding meaning in life should be facilitated by engaging in rewarding activities, such as pursuing satisfying work and participating in community and religious organizations (Sherkat & Reed, 1992), or by having another child after the death and investing in relationships with the remaining children (Najman et al, 1993). For example, Videka-Sherman (1982) considered that having another child after the death was a "constructive action" for the parents and found that their doing so was a significant predictor of better psychological adjustment to the loss.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term effects of the death of a child on parents' adjustment in midlife.

Rogers

Floyd

Seltzer

et al. 2008

Journal of Family Psychology

259

237

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The death of a child is a traumatic event that can have long-term effects on the lives of parents. This study examined bereaved parents of deceased children (infancy to age 34) and comparison parents with similar backgrounds (n = 428 per group) identified in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. An average of 18.05 years following the death, when parents were age 53, bereaved parents reported more depressive symptoms, poorer well-being, and more health problems and were more likely to have experienced a depressive episode and marital disruption than were comparison parents. Recovery from grief was associated with having a sense of life purpose and having additional children but was unrelated to the cause of death or the amount of time since the death. The results point to the need for detection and intervention to help those parents who are experiencing lasting grief. Keywords bereavement; nonnormative parenting; death of child; parental grief; midlife Each year, over 50,000 U.S. children die (U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 2000). The death of a child is one of the most painful events that an adult can experience and is linked to complicated/traumatic grief reactions (Prigerson et al., 1999). For parents, the dissolution of the attachment relationship with the child elicits severe anxiety and other negative emotions associated with loss (Bowlby, 1980). Parents might also experience guilt about having been unable to protect the child (Gilbert, 1997). Furthermore, because the death of a child defies the expected order of life events, many parents experience the event as a challenge to basic existential assumptions (Wheeler, 2001).In light of the significance of child death as a traumatic experience for parents, research on parental bereavement is more limited than might be expected. Most studies have been clinical NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript descriptions of participants in grief support groups (e.g., Compassionate Friends), so the findings likely have been influenced both by the self-selection factors that led individuals to seek this type of help and by the participants' experiences in the support groups. As a result, the findings cannot be generalized to the broader population of bereaved parents. Furthermore, drawing from traditional models of grief resolution that emphasize relatively short-term adaptations, researchers have usually assessed functioning for only a brief period during the acute phase of bereavement. Few studies have examined longer term outcomes, and most that have done so have used retrospective reports, which are subject to distortion when individuals recall their functioning many years earlier (e.g., Nelson & Frantz, 1996;Stehbens & Lascari, 1974).The purpose of the present study was to examine the life course impacts of parental bereavement in an unselected sample of adults who were studied prospectively from early adulthood, prior to the birth of the child, to middle age, usually many years after the death of the child. We ide...

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The effects of religion and social support on self-esteem and depression among the suddenly bereaved

Cited by 119 publications

References 37 publications

Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample

Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample

Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries.

Long-term effects of the death of a child on parents' adjustment in midlife.

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