Grieving Parents' Meaning-Making Narration in Relation to Value Orientations: A Cross-Cultural Study
Parents; Female; Descriptive Statistics; Human; Adult; Male; Reflection; Complicated Grief; Comparative Studies; Psychosocial Factors; Life Experiences; Parent-Child Relations; Evaluation; Middle Age; Narratives; Autobiographical Memory; Chinese Persons; Cultural Values; Ethnological Research; Life Purpose; Scales; Self Assessment; Self Report; Swiss Persons
This study investigated the association between prolonged grief (PG) severity and meaning-making narration in a cross-cultural context, and specifically aimed to illustrate the role of value orientation in shaping the grieving process. 30 Chinese and 22 Swiss parents who lost their child were asked to narrate and appraise specific memories to reflect their self-evaluation of traditional and modern values. The self-reported Prolonged Grief Disorder Scale (ref ICD-11) assessed PG severity. Compared with the Swiss sample, the Chinese sample provided more elaborated memories, which was not associated with symptom severity. Both Chinese and Swiss bereaved parents with more severe PG provided more narratives of loss-related memories, particularly in response to modern values. They also provided more appraisals of negative meanings for self-defining memories, particularly in relation to their traditional values. These findings indicate that, despite cultural differences in narration tendency, PG severity in bereaved parents was associated with the maladaptive integration of autobiographical memories across different cultures, in relation to value orientations. A clinical implication is the potential value of facilitating narrations of grieving clients that center on value orientations to mitigate the hardship of the personal loss.
Xiu D; Maercker A; Killikelly C; Yang Y; Jia X
Transcultural Psychiatry
2023
Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
<a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/1363461520970735%5C">10.1177/1363461520970735\</a>"
Prolonged Grief, Autobiographical Memory, and Its Interaction With Value Orientations in China and Switzerland
Bereavement; China; Cues; Cultural Diversity; Cultural Values -- China; Cultural Values -- Switzerland; Grief; Human; Memory; Parents; Personal Values; Recognition (psychology); Switzerland
As a psychopathological function of prolonged grief (PG) disorder, disruptions in autobiographical memory have been shown in bereaved individuals in terms of preferred access of loss-related memory and reduced specificity in non-loss-related memory. The present study examined these features in two distinct cultural groups. The cultural differences between these two groups were further investigated in the light of their personal value orientations. A sample of 30 Chinese and 30 Swiss bereaved parents who had lost their child completed the Autobiographical Memory Test and self-reported scales to assess the severity of PG and traditional versus modern value orientations. Consistent with previous studies, more severe PG was found to be associated with a greater proportion of loss-related memories and reduced specificity of non-loss memories in the combined sample, particularly in response to negative cues. These manifestations were observed in the Chinese sample as a whole (but more salient in participants with low traditional values), as well as in the Swiss participants with low traditional values. By contrast, Swiss bereaved parents with high traditional values showed deliberate grief avoidance, as more severe PG was associated with a smaller proportion of loss-related memory for negative cues but a greater proportion of specific non-loss-related memory. These findings indicate that although the same psychopathological memory retrieval process applies to bereaved parents from different cultural backgrounds, the manifestations of disruptions in autobiographical remembering are moderated by culture and personal value orientations.
Xiu D; Maercker A; Yang Y; Jia Xiaoming
Journal Of Cross Cultural Psychology
2017
Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
<a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/0022022117723529" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">10.1177/0022022117723529</a>