Event Phone: 701-690-2297

About the program:

Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD 

The lens of neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience has previously been underdeveloped as an approach to understanding grief and grieving. Human neuroimaging has shown that the most significant impact of the death of a loved one is in those who have the most severe psychological grief reactions, and bonding and separation in animal neurobiology shed light on what happens in humans during acute grief. Knowledge about how the brain learns new information is helpful to understanding the trajectory of adaptation during bereavement.
Why does grief hurt so much? Why does death, the permanent absence of a person with whom you are bonded, result in such devastating feelings and lead to behavior and beliefs that are inexplicable, even to the grieving person? Neuroscience and clinical psychology can provide some answers beyond the what of grief—but more importantly, the why. Some of the answers to our questions about grief can be found in the brain, the seat of our thoughts and feelings, motivations, and behaviors. By looking at grief from the perspective of the brain, we will discuss the contemporary neuroscience of the how of grief in order to better understand the why.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD – Associate Professor at the University of Arizona Department of Psychology, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab. She earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona in 2004 and following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. She served for three years as Director of Clinical Training in the Psychology Department. Her research program focuses on the wide-ranging emotional responses to bereavement. In particular, she investigates the neurobiological and psychophysiological aspects that vary between individual grief responses via functional neuroimaging, immune, and endocrine analysis. Dr. O’Connor also researches difficulties adapting following the death of a loved one, termed prolonged grief (newly included in the revised DSM-5). She believes that a clinical science approach toward the experience and physiology of grief can improve psychological treatment. Dr. O’Connor’s recent book, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (2022; Harper One) has garnered praise from peers and literary critics alike and has led to speaking engagements around the world.

In addition to her outstanding record of scholarship, Dr. O’Connor is a highly proficient and beloved teacher and mentor, honored with the Undergraduate Biology Research Program (UBRP) “Outstanding Mentor Award” in 2014. In 2020, she organized an international multidisciplinary research group called the Neurobiology of Grief International Network (NOGIN). Under her leadership, the group has held three international conferences supported by the National Institute on Aging. Dr. O’Connor is a highly sought-after speaker, giving numerous talks and workshops to community organizations around the world, including in-service trainings to healthcare professionals and volunteers at hospices. She has authored research papers published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, from American Journal of Psychiatry to Neuro Image to Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Dr. O’Connor’s work has been discussed in the New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Scientific American.

Objectives

At the conclusion of this program, participants will be able to:

• Describe how the neurobiological attachment system encodes relationship bonds in humans and pair-bonded animals, using neurochemicals like oxytocin, dopamine and endogenous opioids.
• Define prolonged grief disorder and describe psychological and neuroscientific data that identify it.
• Explain how rumination and avoidance can prolong the process of updating the prediction (i.e., learning) that the deceased is no longer available.

CONFERENCE TOPIC:

The Neuroscience of Grief: How We Learn From Love & Loss

Agenda/Schedule (times are in CDT)