Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2018

DOI

10.3390/ijerph15081736

Publication Title

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Volume

15

Issue

8

Pages

1736 (19 pages)

Abstract

The fading affect bias (FAB) occurs when unpleasant affect fades faster than pleasant affect. To detect mechanisms that influence the FAB in the context of death, we measured neuroticism, depression, anxiety, negative religious coping, death attitudes, and complicated grief as potential predictors of FAB for unpleasant/death and pleasant events at 2 points in time. The FAB was robust across older and newer events, which supported the mobilization-minimization hypothesis. Unexpectedly, complicated grief positively predicted FAB, and death avoidant attitudes moderated this relation, such that the Initial Event Affect by Grief interaction was only significant at the highest 3 quintiles of death avoidant attitudes. These results were likely due to moderate grief ratings, which were, along with avoidant death attitudes, related to healthy outcomes in past research. These results implicate complicated grief and death avoidant attitudes as resiliency mechanisms that are mobilized during bereavement to minimize its unpleasant effects.

Comments

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

Original Publication Citation

Gibbons, J. A., Lee, S. A., Fehr, A. M. A., Wilson, K. J., & Marshall, T. R. (2018). Grief and Avoidant Death Attitudes Combine to Predict the Fading Affect Bias. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(8), 1736. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15081736

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