George A. Bonanno

Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?

Many people are exposed to loss or potentially traumatic events at some point in their lives, and yet they continue to have positive emotional experiences and show only minor an...

Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss.

The vast majority of bereavement research is conducted after a loss has occurred. Thus, knowledge of the divergent trajectories of grieving or their antecedent predictors is lac...

The varieties of grief experience

The bereavement literature has yet to show consensus on a clear definition of normal and abnormal or complicated grief reactions. According to DSM-IV, bereavement is a stressor ...

Toward an integrative perspective on bereavement.

For nearly a century, bereavement theorists have assumed that recovery from loss requires a period of grief work in which the ultimate goal is the severing of the attachment bon...

A study of laughter and dissociation: Distinct correlates of laughter and smiling during bereavement.

Laughter facilitates the adaptive response to stress by increasing the psychological distance from distress and by enhancing social relations. To test these hypotheses, the auth...

Facial expressions of emotion and the course of conjugal bereavement.

The common assumption that emotional expression mediates the course of bereavement is tested. Competing hypotheses about the direction of mediation were formulated from the grie...

Self-Enhancement as a Buffer Against Extreme Adversity: Civil War in Bosnia and Traumatic Loss in the United States

In a challenge to traditional views of mental health, Taylor and Brown argued that an overly positive or enhanced perception of the self was adaptive, particularly in conditions...

Loss and human resilience

When avoiding unpleasant emotions might not be such a bad thing: Verbal-autonomic response dissociation and midlife conjugal bereavement.

It has been widely assumed that emotional avoidance during bereavement leads to either prolonged grief, delayed grief, or delayed somatic symptoms. To test this view, as well as...

Predicting the Willingness to Disclose Childhood Sexual Abuse from Measures of Repressive Coping and Dissociative Tendencies

Although it is generally agreed that the verbal disclosure of past childhood sexual abuse (CSA) experiences can be beneficial, CSA survivors are often reluctant to reveal such e...

Examining the Delayed Grief Hypothesis Across 5 Years of Bereavement

Traditional bereavement theories emphasize that it is crucial to work through the emotional meanings of a loss and that the failure to do so typically results in delayed grief s...

The Importance of Being Flexible

Researchers have documented the consequences of both expressing and suppressing emotion using between-subjects designs. It may be argued, however, that successful adaptation dep...