Q: Why do certain people not exhibit any grief patterns?
A: Up until recently, it hasn't really been known. Most investigators in the field, I think, would say that people who don't show grief have something wrong with them they either are defensive, or cold, or they never cared about the person to begin with, or they weren't attached. I had argued no, maybe they're just healthy people. We followed a group of people in Michigan over six years in a bereavement study where we knew a lot about the people before the loss occurred. We showed that about half the sample showed no symptoms at any point in the study. They just were not depressed before or after the loss, and we found that they were healthy people. They had fine relationships. The interviewers did not find them cold or aloof, and they did not score high on a measure we had of avoidant attachment. That doesn't mean that a healthy person won't grief also, but it seemed that they [a person who feels no grief] might feel sad, they might miss the person, but they keep functioning. We know that the people who don't show grief, it's fair to say, are healthy people.
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Q: You have studied bereavement both in the United States and in China. Are there any notable cultural differences you've found in terms of grieving?
A: Americans grieve the loss of a child very severely; they grieve much more profoundly when they lose a child than when they lose a spouse. That's been shown in a few studies and we found that in our study, but the Chinese didn't do that. They grieved the loss of the spouse and the loss of a child the same. So there are cultural differences.
