Camille Wortman

Stony Brook University | Stony Brook · Department of Psychology

Losing a loved one suddenly or under traumatic circumstances often leaves survivors completely overwhelmed, their lives fundamentally changed. Survivors experience what is termed traumatic bereavement, which is associated with enduring symptoms of trauma, such as intrusive thoughts, and of grief, such as yearning for the loved one. Research has fou...

The flaws in today’s healthcare systems and practices are well-documented: millions remain far from optimal health due to a variety of psychological and social factors; large numbers of patients do not fully cooperate with medical advice; errors in medical decision-making—some stemming from flaws in interpersonal relations—regularly lead to needles...

The death of a loved one is a ubiquitous human experience and is often regarded as a serious threat to health and well-being. Coming to terms with personal loss is considered to be an important part of successful adult development. In this chapter, we draw from our own research and that of others to explore how people are affected by the death of a...

Bereavement is a universal experience, and its association with excess morbidity and mortality is well established. Nevertheless, grief becomes a serious health concern for a relative few. For such individuals, intense grief persists, is distressing and disabling, and may meet criteria as a distinct mental disorder. At present, grief is not recogni...

The magnitude and predictors of longitudinal behavioral change are reported in a cohort of homosexual men at risk for AIDS. Self-reports of sexual behavior were obtained at two points in time separated by an interval of approximately six months. These self-reports were used to construct both dichotomous and continuous measures of changes in behavio...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51393/1/Williams R, Behavior Change and Compliance, 1993.pdf

Most studies of widowhood have focused on reactions during the first few years postloss. The authors investigated whether widowhood had more enduring effects using a nationally representative U.S. sample. Participants were 768 individuals who had lost their spouse (from a few months to 64 years) prior to data collection. Results indicated that the...

Longitudinal analyses reported here explored the relationship between a perceived sense of being at risk for AIDS and a variety of behavioral, social, and psychological consequences. Data were obtained from a cohort of 637 homosexual men living in Chicago, who are participating in a psychosocial study and have completed two waves of data collection...

A recent study by Pheterson, Kiesler, and Goldberg (1971) has been cited many times as providing evidence that women underrate the work of other women. Close examination of their results, however, revealed a number of ambiguities. The present study modified and extended their design in an attempt to describe the nature of sex biases more clearly. S...

Following conjugal loss, some people show relatively little distress for the first several months, whereas others show considerable distress. In this article we examine these patterns over a 4-year period. Drawing on prior research defining grief trajectories, we conducted repeated measures analyses of variance on data from 92 bereaved elders with...

This study examines (a) whether widowhood affects the performance of daily household activities, (b) the extent to which dependence on children mediates the effect of widowhood on subsequent housework performance, and (c) the extent to which these patterns vary by gender. Using the Changing Lives of Older Couples study, a prospective survey of marr...

Using prospective longitudinal data on an older sample beginning prior to the death of a spouse, G. A. Bonanno et al. (2002) distinguished 5 unique trajectories of bereavement outcome: common grief, chronic grief, chronic depression, depression followed by improvement, and resilience. These trajectories having been identified, the aims of the curre...

The vast majority of bereavement research is conducted after a loss has occurred. Thus, knowledge of the divergent trajectories of grieving or their antecedent predictors is lacking. This study gathered prospective data on 205 individuals several years prior to the death of their spouse and at 6- and 18-months postloss. Five core bereavement patter...

This study evaluated how levels of social participation change as a result of late-life widowhood. Social participation is a multidimensional construct incorporating both formal (e.g., meeting attendance, religious participation, and volunteer obligations) and informal (e.g., telephone contact and social interactions with friends) social roles. Usi...

This study examined if older adults' psychological adjustment to widowhood varies based on whether the death was sudden or anticipated and if these effects are mediated by death context characteristics (e.g., predeath caregiving, nursing home use, spouse's age at death, and couple's communication about the death). The effects of forewarning on mult...

Three assumptions guiding research and clinical intervention strategies for people coping with sudden, traumatic loss are that (a) people confronting such losses inevitably search for meaning, (b) over time most are able to find meaning and put the issue aside, and (c) finding meaning is critical for adjustment or healing. We review existing empiri...

This study examined whether psychological adjustment to widowhood is affected by three aspects of marital quality--warmth, conflict, and instrumental dependence-assessed prior to the loss. The Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) is a prospective study of a two-stage area probability sample of 1,532 married individuals aged 65 and older. The CLOC...

We investigated the impact of widowhood on depression and how resources and contextual factors that define the meaning of loss modified this effect. In a prospective, nationally representative sample of women in the US aged 54 or older we compared 64 women who were widowed in the 3 years between data collection waves with 431 women who were stably...

Studies suggest that symptoms of traumatic grief constitute a distinct syndrome worthy of diagnosis. A consensus conference aimed to develop and test a criteria set for traumatic grief. The expert panel proposed consensus criteria for traumatic grief. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analyses tested the performance of the proposed criteria on...

This article provides a broad overview of empirical research on bereavement. We draw on existing research to address three major clinical issues. First, how do people typically respond to major losses? We argue that many reactions assumed to be abnormal, such as the failure to exhibit intense distress following a loss, are more common than believed...

Homosexual and bisexual men (N = 825) enrolled in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study in Chicago completed a 90-minute self-administered questionnaire that included the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, a Well-Being Index, and the Hopkins Symptom Checklist. Participants indicated their experiences with gay stigma, their visibility as gay men, their involv...

The impact of diverse traumas on world views was assessed with a community sample (N = 3,617) interviewed in 1986 and 1989. Four types of world views were examined including fatalism, justice, vulnerability, and self-view. Types of trauma included the death of a spouse, parent, or child, job loss, life-threatening illness, and physical assault. Ove...

Health benefits derived from personal trauma disclosure are well established. This study examined whether disclosing emotions generated by imaginative immersion in a novel traumatic event would similarly enhance health and adjustment. College women, preselected for trauma presence, were randomly assigned to write about real traumas, imaginary traum...

People who have experienced a traumatic life event may blame themselves, in part, because they perceive that they could have avoided the event. A study of respondents with spinal cord injuries shows that their causal attributions for the event are distinguishable from their perceptions of avoidability, the latter frequently focusing on mutable aspe...

The study examined how social constraints on discussion of a traumatic experience can interfere with cognitive processing of and recovery from loss. Bereaved mothers were interviewed at 3 weeks (T1), 3 months (T2), and 18 months (T3) after their infants' death. Intrusive thoughts at T1, conceptualized as a marker of cognitive processing, were negat...

The study examined how social constraints on discussion of a traumatic experience can interfere with cognitive processing of and recovery from loss. Bereaved mothers were interviewed at 3 weeks (T1), 3 months (T2), and 18 months (T3) after their infants' death. Intrusive thoughts at T1, conceptualized as a marker of cognitive processing, were negat...

Counterfactuals generated by victims of traumatic events were examined to elucidate their significance for the coping process. In Study 1, respondents were interviewed 4-7 years after the loss of their spouse or child in a motor vehicle accident. In Study 2, respondents were interviewed at 3 weeks and 18 months following the death of their child fr...

In this chapter, we focus on how people react to the loss of an immediate family member, with special emphasis on reactions to sudden, traumatic loss. Although a few studies have examined loss as a result of community-level events such as floods or fires (see, e.g., Erikson, 1994; Green et al., 1990; Lindy, Green, Grace, & Titchener, 1983), the vas...

The NEO Five Factor Personality Inventory (NEO-FFI; Costa & McCrae, 1989) and representative personality scales drawn from health psychology were administered to 2 samples of male military recruits (Ns = 296 and 502). Factor analysis of health-related personality scales revealed 3 conceptually meaningful domains. Examination of these domains and th...

Parents (N = 124) who had lost an infant to sudden infant death syndrome were interviewed 3 weeks and 18 months postloss. Two components of religion (religious participation and religious importance) were assessed, and their relations with 3 coping-process variables (perceived social support, cognitive processing of the loss, and finding meaning in...

Survey data collected in 1984-85 from a community sample of 637 gay and bisexual men were used to determine the features of social relationships that were most conductive to changes in both psychological health and AIDS-related sexual risk behavior. Multiple regression analyses showed that both the perceived availability of social support and the a...

We examined positive and negative life changes reported by bereaved spouses and parents 4-7 years after the sudden loss of a family member (N = 94). Although the bereaved described significantly more positive than negative life changes in response to a series of open-ended interview questions, the number of positive life changes reported was unrela...

This study presents analyses on questionnaire data collected from a panel of 520 gay men at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, enrolled in the Coping and Change Study (1985-1987). The data were assessed to determine the association of social support and coping styles with subsequent depression and global distress and to investigate wheth...

Contrary to unidimensional conceptions of optimism and pessimism, factor analysis of 2 widely used instruments revealed that optimism and pessimism are empirically differentiable, but related, constructs. Moreover, consistent with expectations, optimism and pessimism were differentially linked with fundamental dimensions of mood and personality. Pe...

Contrary to unidimensional conceptions of optimism and pessimism, factor analysis of 2 widely used instruments revealed that optimism and pessimism are empirically differentiable, but related, constructs. Moreover, consistent with expectations, optimism and pessimism were differentially linked with fundamental dimensions of mood and personality. Pe...

Results from a 1986 national survey (N = 3,614) show that having ever been widowed is associated with current levels of depression and that this association is greater for men than women. Some of this apparent gender difference occurs because men have been widowed for a shorter average period of time than women and the effects of widowhood appear t...

A sample of 139 married couples with young children and with relatively equal status careers (wives were university professors or businesswomen) were interviewed about work and home life. Considerable, traditional inequity in the distribution of child-care tasks and chore responsibility was noted, but women were generally satisfied with their husba...

The authors' goal is to provide basic epidemiologic data on the issue of reactivity to stress and HIV symptom onset by studying the relationship between a broad set of naturally occurring stressor events and HIV natural history in a large longitudinal community sample of HIV-seropositive homosexual men. Subjects were recruited from a cohort of 1,01...

In this chapter we highlight findings from a program of research on coping with role strain and role conflict. Earlier research from our laboratory has focused primarily on how people deal with stressful life events such as physical disability (e.g., Bulman & Wortman, 1977) or the loss of a loved one (see, e.g., Lehman, Wortman, & Williams, 1987)....

Field studies have not yet conclusively established how attributions affect adjustment to unanticipated traumatic events. This may be due, in part, to the adoption of several untested assumptions in most prior research. It has usually been assumed that attributional issues are important to people who experience a traumatic event, that such concern...

This study describes the mental health of a large cohort of gay men participating in the Chicago Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study/Coping and Change Study. Six biannual questionnaires were self-administered between 1984 and 1988. General mental health was determined by the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL). An abbreviated version of the Center for Epide...

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of four models of helping and coping as they relate to cancer care. The four conceptual models focus on the issue of whether or not patients should be viewed as responsible for the cause or the treatment of their cancer. The moral model, characterized by the holistic health movement, holds patients respons...

This study examines alternative models of how women combine perceptions of role conflict and enhancement. The role perception continuum model proposes that perceptions of enhancement and conflict are best represented on a continuum anchored by conflict and enhancement, on the assumption that these perceptions are mutually exclusive. The role percep...

propose that victims of stressful life events can shape the support interaction by means of their self-presentations of how they are coping present a brief overview of our theoretical approach, illustrating how victims of stressful life events can unintentionally initiate feelings of vulnerability and helplessness in others describe the process...

One category of workers for whom the transmission of stress between work and home is particularly problematic are those women who are attempting to nurture a young family and a career at the same time. Mothers of pre-school-age children comprise the fastest growing segment of the American work force (Hayghe, 1986). Fifty-two percent of such women a...

Drawing from theory and clinical lore, we consider how individuals are assumed to cope following irrevocable loss. Several assumptions are reviewed reflecting beliefs concerning the grieving process. Specifically, we examine the expectation that depression is inevitable following loss; that distress is necessary, and failure to experience it is ind...

Explored long-term family adjustment to sudden, unexpected bereavement by conducting interviews with 40 Ss whose spouse died in a motor vehicle crash 4–7 yrs earlier and with 39 matched controls. Interviews were also conducted with 54 parents whose 1–28 yr old child died in a motor vehicle crash 4–7 yrs earlier and with 61 matched controls. Finding...

Data from a general population sample of 621 healthy homosexual men are used to evaluate the social and emotional effects of HIV antibody status, clinical signs detected by medical examination, and subjectively perceived symptoms. Participants are unaware of their serologic status at the time of data collection, thus allowing the effects of the vir...

This study explored the burdens experienced by 42 adults who lived with a depressed patient and related these burdens to their degree of psychological distress. The comparison group consisted of 23 adults who were living with someone who had been an in- or outpatient but who was not currently in a depressive episode. Respondents who were living wit...

In this article we examine the long-term effects of the sudden, unexpected loss of a spouse or child. In the spouse study, interviews were conducted with 39 individuals who had lost a spouse in a motor vehicle crash 4 to 7 years ago and with 39 matched controls. In the parent study, interviews were conducted with 41 parents who had lost a child in...

Interviewed 40 people (mean age 44 yrs) who had lost a spouse and 54 people (mean age 42 yrs) who had lost a child in a motor vehicle accident 4–7 yrs earlier to gather information concerning support attempts from others that were helpful and unhelpful. Support attempts most frequently mentioned as helpful were contact with a similar other and oppo...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67574/2/10.1177_109019818601300405.pdf

Presents an obituary for Philip Brickman, whose distinguished career in social psychology focused on issues such as justice, happiness, pain, inequality, helping, and coping. From 1968 to 1978, he was a faculty member in the psychology department at Northwestern University. In 1979, he went to the University of Michigan, where he joined the faculty...

Our review has focused centrally on the etiologic significance of social factors in the development of psychopathology. Our implicit assumption has been that social factors in general, and stressors in particular, may play a causal role in the development of psychopathology. Yet the evidence is clear that the vast majority of people who are exposed...

We became interested in the topic of social support while studying how people cope with a variety of life crises such as loss of a loved one, life-threatening illness, and physical disability. In most discussions of social support, it is generally assumed that support attempts made by the provider will be valued and appreciated by the receiver. The...

For the past several years, Wortman and her associates have been studying how people react to undesirable life events, such as permanent paralysis, chronic illness, criminal victimization and loss of a loved one (e.g. Bulman & Wortman, 1977; Wortmann & Dunkel-Schetter, 1979; Silver & Wortman, 1980). We have examined such variables as victims’ emoti...

Discusses research issues associated with the study of the effects of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) on the psychosocial welfare of gay males, focusing on 5 areas: obtaining qualitative data, developing inventories, sampling in the gay community, building community networks, and characterizing the crisis of AIDS. Behavioral changes wrou...

In this paper, an attempt has been made to provide an overview of the major issues facing cancer researchers who are interested in the conceptualization and measurement of social support. Taken as a whole, the literature reflects a growing appreciation for the complexity of the social-support construct, and a need for greater conceptual and researc...

The papers in this issue reflect an exciting new direction in social psychology that has been emerging for the past decade. Since the 1960's, social psychologists have devoted a great deal of attention to understanding reactions to outcomes that are stressful or uncontrollable. Until recently, the majority of these studies were conducted in laborat...

A series of articles in the Journal of Personality challenge several central assumptions of the reformulated learned helplessness model: that perceptions of uncontrollability, awareness of noncontingency between responses and outcomes, and attributions made about the outcome are necessary to explain learned helplessness effects. The present article...

Explores the cognitions that are associated with behavior in achievement settings and the coping strategies that are used in such settings to minimize distress and maximize performance. At least 3 major research areas have addressed the issue of performance in achievement settings: the achievement motivation area, the test anxiety field, and the ar...

Describes a research program conducted by the 1st author and her students to examine individuals' reactions to uncontrollable negative outcomes and how these reactions change over time. The authors illustrate how their thoughts on this topic have changed and developed over several years, necessitating a departure from the predictable confines of th...

This paper focuses on the effect of cancer on the patient's interpersonal relationships, and the ultimate impact of these relationships on the patient's emotional adjustment to the disease. In a detailed theoretical analysis, both the patient's reaction to the illness and others' responses toward the patient are explored. Concerning the patient, th...

• Considers that the reformulation of the learned helplessness model by L. Y. Abramson et al (see record 1979-00305-001 ) overcomes many of the shortcomings inherent in the original model and raises questions for future research on helplessness and depression. A critique is made of the various components of the reformulated model: (a) Some question...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between victims' attributions of causality for their accidents and their ability to cope with severe misfortune. A total of 29 individuals who had been paralyzed in serious accidents were intensively interviewed. Both quantitative and open-ended questions were used to elicit attributions of blam...

This study explores some factors that might influence public attributes about social experiments. Subjects read a supposedly real news account of a medical experiment in which the scarcity of the treatment employed and the amount of scientific justification for the experiment were experimentally varied. As expected, subjects reacted negatively to t...

The experiment tested the hypothesis that the stress experienced by a person who is unable to control aversive stimulation is not a function of lack of control per se, but of the attribution of causality that (s)he makes for failure to exert control. Subjects were given a problem-solving task, and were told that they could prevent aversive noise bu...

A contract-option educational experience designed and presented by selected upperclass students for introductory students is highly rated by both.

This experiment examined the effect of timing of an intimate disclosure and assignment of responsibility for the event disclosed on interpersonal attraction. Subjects were induced to interact with a confederate who in all cases revealed something quite personal about himself. The disclosure occurred either early or near the end of a 10-minute conve...

Examined how participants of social programs react to the process of random assignment and considered whether these reactions alone could produce apparent treatment effects. Exp I, with 60 undergraduates, ostensibly involved an evaluation of a social program. Ss were assigned to either a desirable or a no-treatment control condition via 3 randomiza...

This chapter investigates how individuals react when they are unable to exert control over their environment—when they are unable to have options or reach goals that are important to them, or when they are forced to endure outcomes that they would not voluntarily choose. It reviews a number of theories that have focused on the importance of control...

72 male and 72 female undergraduates each read an insurance company accident report in which the immediate cause of the accident (internal or external to the driver), the prior cause of the cause (internal, external, or none specified), and the particular accident (4 versions) were experimentally manipulated. A prior cause opposite to the immediate...

Tested the hypothesis that an individual will feel control over an outcome if he causes the outcome and if he knows before causing it what he hopes to obtain. 65 male undergraduates were shown 2 consumer items and told that they would get to win 1 by a chance drawing. 2 marbles of different colors were placed in a can and mixed up. One-third of the...

Required 40 senior high school boys to take a test of social perceptiveness containing 5 sample and 10 official questions. Half of the Ss were led to do well on the sample questions, while half were led to do poorly. Half of the Ss anticipated continuing with the official questions, while half did not. In addition, all Ss were faced with a successf...

Manipulated both the likelihood and the severity of behavioral consequences in a 2 * 3 factorial design. 113 male undergraduates were asked to assign blame to an individual who was involved in an accident. The consequences were described as either likely or unlikely, and were either mild, severe, or not revealed. The actor's behavior was viewed as...