← Giant Brain Candy
Giant Brain Candy: Yearning Looks Like Wanting. In a small brain-scan study, reminders of a loved one who had died activated a reward region, the nucleus accumbens, only in people with complicated grief, in step with how strongly they yearned. Source: Yearning and the reward system.
Growing evidenceThe research
  1. O'Connor, M.-F., Wellisch, D. K., Stanton, A. L., Eisenberger, N. I., Irwin, M. R., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008). Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center. NeuroImage, 42(2), 969–972.

Journey 3 · Grief

Yearning Looks Like Wanting

In a small brain-scan study, reminders of a loved one who had died activated a reward region, the nucleus accumbens, only in people with complicated grief, in step with how strongly they yearned.

Source: Yearning and the reward system · Growing evidence

Share this card

XFacebookLinkedInPinterestWhatsAppThreadsEmail
Download the picture

Instagram or TikTok: download the picture and post it.

30 days of All-Access, free — every journey and every feature. No card.

Start free — 30 days of All-Access

More from Grief

Giant Brain Candy: The Stages Began With the Dying. The five stages first described patients facing their own deaths, not people grieving a loss. In 233 bereaved people, acceptance was what they reported most, from the first month on. Source: Testing the five stages.
Giant Brain Candy: Bending Without Breaking. Following people from years before a spouse died to 18 months after, researchers found resilience was the most common pattern: real sorrow, with daily life holding its shape. Source: Resilience after loss.
Giant Brain Candy: A Word Born Heavy. The English word grief comes, through Old French, from the Latin gravare, ‘to make heavy’, which comes from gravis, ‘weighty’. Source: The roots of the word grief.
All of Grief’s Brain Candy, and every other journey’s →