Few of us will make it through life without losing someone we love.

Grief, it's been said, is the cost of love.

The yearning and sadness we feel after someone dies is the price we sometimes pay for the close relationships that we treasure.

Some people are resilient after loss, able to cope with their acute grief and eventually adjust to life without their loved one.

Others, meanwhile, find themselves unable to do so.

Over the past two decades, researchers have begun using the tools of modern neuroscience

to better understand why that is, and more broadly, to understand what happens to our brains and bodies during the

grieving process and how best to help people mourning the death of a loved one.

So what makes someone more or less resilient in the face of loss?

How is grieving related to depression and how is it different?

What happens to our brains when we are grieving?

Is there effective therapy for grief? Is it possible to experience actual grief over the death of a

celebrity? And how is that grief different from grief over the loss of a loved one? How can we best

support people when they are grieving? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology,

the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links

between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Mary Francis O'Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she studies grief and grieving.

She uses methods including brain imaging and studying immune system responses to investigate how grieving affects us both psychologically and physiologically.

She is an expert in complicated grief, a clinical condition in which people don't adjust to

acute feelings of grief. In addition to her many scientific publications, she is author of the

recent book, The Grieving Brain, the Surprising Science of how we learn from love and

loss. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. O'Connor.

It's so good to be here. Thanks.

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