Author: Huang FY1, Hsu AL2, Hsu LM3, Tsai JS4,5, Huang CM6, Chao YP7, Hwang TJ8, Wu CW9,10
Affiliation: <sup>1</sup>Department of Education, College of Education, National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Taiwan.
<sup>2</sup>Department of Radiology, Wan Fang Hospital, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.
<sup>3</sup>Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center, School of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States.
<sup>4</sup>Department of Family Medicine, College of Medicine and Hospital, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
<sup>5</sup>Center for Complementary and Integrated Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
<sup>6</sup>Department of Biological Science and Technology, College of Biological Science and Technology, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
<sup>7</sup>Graduate Institute of Medical Mechatronics, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan.
<sup>8</sup>Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan.
<sup>9</sup>Graduate Institute of Mind, Brain and Consciousness, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.
<sup>10</sup>Research Center of Brain and Consciousness, Shuang Ho Hospital, New Taipei, Taiwan.
Conference/Journal: Front Hum Neurosci.
Date published: 2019 Jan 28
Other:
Volume ID: 12 , Pages: 541 , Special Notes: doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00541. eCollection 2018. , Word Count: 258
The grief of bereavement is recognized as a severe psychosocial stressor that can trigger a variety of mental and physical disorders, and the long-lasting unresolved grief has a detrimental effect on brain functionality. Literature has documented mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) as an efficient treatment for improving well-being, specifically related to the mood and cognition, in a variety of populations. However, little attention has been devoted to neural mechanisms with regard to bereaved individuals' cognition after MBCT intervention. In this study, we recruited 23 bereaved participants who lost a significant relative within 6 months to 4 years to attend 8-week MBCT course. We used self-reporting questionnaires to measure emotion regulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with the numerical Stroop task to evaluate the MBCT effect on executive control among the bereaved participants. The self-reported questionnaires showed improvements on mindfulness and reductions in grief, difficulties in emotion regulation, anxiety, and depression after the MBCT intervention. The fMRI analysis demonstrated two scenarios: (1) the activity of the fronto-parietal network slightly declined accompanied with significant improvements in the reaction time of incongruent trials; (2) the activities in the posterior cingulate cortex and thalamus were positively associated with the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief, implying emotional interferences on cognitive functions. Results indicated that MBCT facilitated the executive control function by alleviating the emotional interferences over the cognitive functions and suggested that the 8-week MBCT intervention significantly improved both executive control and emotion regulation in bereaved individuals.
KEYWORDS: bereavement grief; emotion regulation; executive control; functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)
PMID: 30745865 PMCID: PMC6360180 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00541