Domains of Grief: Cognitive
A person wearing a jacket with their hands covering their face bending over. A black and white image.
The cognitive domain of grief means that we will take a quick peak at neuroscience, but that will not be the overall focus. Promise! This discussion will focus more on understanding what happens in our brains and thoughts, offering all of us a chance to bring compassion, empathy, and understanding to a grief. My guess is that many of us have heard, in some context or another, that we need to ‘get over’ our grief and move on. Understanding what happens with grief can help us combat that message and remember that grief is something we integrate into our lives and not get over.
Greif and the Cognitive Domain
As a gentle reminder, people may experience none or one or more the following while they are grieving a loss:
Difficulty concentrating and focusing
Memory problems
Confusion and disorientation
Difficulty making decisions
Preoccupation with the loss
Intrusive thoughts
Decreased attention span and focus
And again, not everyone experiences all of these while others may experience many of them. There is not right or wrong, grief is an individualized experience.
The Brain and Loss
How does the brain understand loss? To answer this question, we look at the work of great researchers including Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD whose work within The University of Arizona focuses on better understanding the grief process psychologically and physiologically.
Within the brain, researchers found that the emotional processing, mentalizing, episodic memory retrieval, processing of familiar faces, visual imagery, autonomic regulation, and modulation or coordination of these functions were activated, thus implicating them in their role during periods of grief (Gündel et al., 2003; O’Connor, 2019). So let’s break this down a little bit more and highlight something more tangible. The brain, in the hippocampus, creates virtual maps that we use to know where to go to meet a specific need, such as finding a loved one (think attachment need). So we create virtual maps use three dimensions (O’Connor, 2019):
Space - Where is X?
Time - When is it possible to search there?
Closeness - In this case think of attachment bonds and the closeness that arises from that bond.
So when a loved one dies, you can no longer find the person in time and space and the brain struggles to understand that based on previous learning. The neural architecture of a bond with another enables a belief that the loved one still exists even though there is substantial evidence saying the opposite (O'Connor & Seeley, 2022). The good news is that this virtual map can be updated with time. This explains why people can say they feel like they are losing their mind.
The above is probably a little simplistic for what actually is potentially a more complicated concept. However, hopefully, it still gives you a general idea when it comes to the cognitive aspect of grief. The brain does have a role, one that we do need to consider.
take action today moment:
Think about the implications of what you just read. How do the structures and brain mechanisms account for some of what people experience in grief in the cognitive domain? Look at the list above and see if you can puzzle it through.Your answer doesn’t have to be perfect or exactly accurate, the exercise is more meant to encourage you to critically think about the role of body and brain in relation to the grief experience.
Learn More About grief and the cognitive domain:
Speaking of Psychology: How grieving changes the brain, with Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD
Grief Is a Learning Experience
References
Gündel, H., O’Connor, M. F., Littrell, L., Fort, C., & Lane, R. D. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of grief: An FMRI study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(11), 1946-1953.
O’Connor, M. F. (2019). Grief: A brief history of research on how body, mind, and brain adapt. Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine, 81(8), 731-738.
O’Connor, M. (2022). The grieving brain: The surprising science of how we learn from love and loss. Harper One.
O'Connor, M. F., & Seeley, S. H. (2022). Grieving as a form of learning: Insights from neuroscience applied to grief and loss. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 317-322.