Joscelyn E. FisherUniformed Services University of the Health Sciences | USUHS · Department of Psychiatry
Joscelyn E. Fisher
Ph.D.
About
57
Publications
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1,203
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2007 - June 2011
August 1999 - December 2006
Publications
Publications (57)
Military families have been affected by combat-related injuries, both visible (e.g., musculoskeletal injuries, amputations, burns) and invisible (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD], traumatic brain injury [TBI]), as well as combat-related bereavement. These profound stressors typically include short-term and long-term challenges that affect...
Background
Children who experience neglect typically endure multiple types of neglect and abuse during a single maltreatment incident. However, research on the phenomenology and predictors of neglect types has primarily examined neglect types in isolation.
Objective
To advance understanding of neglect incidents that more accurately reflect the exp...
Background
Although much has been learned about the physical and psychological impacts of deployment and combat injury on military service members, less is known about the effects of these experiences on military spouses.
Methods
The present study examined self‐reported mental health symptoms (using the Brief Symptom Inventory [BSI]‐18 and the pos...
The COVID-19 coronavirus has caused 5.4 million deaths worldwide, including over 800,000 deaths in the United States (as of December 2021). In addition to these staggering statistics, an even greater number of individuals have died from other causes during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, a large portion of the global population has faced bereav...
For a limited time, full text of this article is available at:
https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1epe89UUG-vl9H
The DOI for published article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaclp.2022.02.007
Background
Bereavement has been associated with increases in immune/inflammatory and neuroendocrine reactions, cardiovascular events, non-specific physical symptoms, mental conditions, and healthcare utilization. However, little is known about bereavement effects in younger samples, multiple health effects within samples, or health changes from pre...
Returning human remains to family members after a loved one's death is thought to support grief adaptation. However, no known research has examined the effects that notifications of fragmented remains have on bereaved family members. We examined the number of notifications received, continuing questions about the death, grief severity, and posttrau...
Background: Bereavement by sudden and violent deaths can lead to increased grief severity, depression, and reduced posttraumatic growth compared to those bereaved by natural causes. These outcomes can be affected by coping strategies and whether a survivor had been “prepared” for the death. The present study examined the effect of coping and consid...
We describe the development of an empirically-derived codebook for qualitative data concerning the impact of grief on the interpersonal relationships of bereaved individuals. Relatives (N = 39) of deceased military service members participated in focus groups concerning how grief influenced their relationships across multiple interpersonal domains,...
Attention biases toward unpleasant information are evident among children and adults with a history of abuse and have been identified as a potential pathway through which abused children develop psychopathology. Identifying whether a history of childhood abuse affects the time course of attention biases in adults is critical, as this may provide in...
Human Remains, Grief, and Posttraumatic Stress in Bereaved Family Members Fourteen Years after September 11, 2001, a forthcoming manuscript in the Journal of Traumatic Stress describes the mental health effects on 9/11-bereaved family members after being notified (often multiple times) that remains of their loved ones were identified. Although retu...
Better understanding of the causes and circumstances of maltreatment deaths of children is needed to prevent tragedy. The purpose of this article is to facilitate understanding of child maltreatment fatality review processes and their outcomes. A literature review was conducted through searches of the databases PubMed, PsycINFO, and EMBASE and thro...
Background:
Bereavement is associated with cognitive difficulties, but it is unclear whether these difficulties are associated with normative and/or complicated grief (CG) and how comorbid depression and anxiety contribute to them. Self-reported "minor errors in thinking" (i.e., cognitive failures) may manifest following bereavement and be differe...
Background/objectives:
Bereavement is associated with increases in prevalence of mental health conditions and in healthcare utilization. Due to younger age and bereavement by sudden and violent deaths, military widows may be vulnerable to poorer outcomes. No systematic research has examined these effects.
Method:
Using outpatient medical records...
Extreme-groups designs (EGDs) are common in psychopathology research, often using diagnostic category as an independent variable. Continuous-variable analysis strategies drawing from a general linear model framework can be applied to such designs. The growing emphasis on dimensional examinations of psychological constructs, encouraged by the Nation...
Objectives
The goal of this session is to characterize the types of child neglect and their associated risk factors within the US Army community to inform effective prevention, policy, and strategy.
Methods
A record review of 400 randomly sampled substantiated neglect cases from 4 Army installations with the highest number of substantiated cases f...
Witnessing the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 affected practically all of us who were alive at that time. But, for some, 9/11 was a far more personal and tragic experience. On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 families lost a loved one who perished at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon or in Shanksville, PA. Although nearly 18 years have...
Studies of terrorism-related deaths are few and mostly focus on short-term effects. To characterize long-term bereavement outcomes, including resilience/recovery and patterns of comorbidity, following the September 11, 2001 (9/11), terrorist attacks, we report mental health conditions and grief-related impairment in 454 9/11 bereaved family members...
Background
Distinguishing a disorder of persistent and impairing grief from normative grief allows clinicians to identify this often undetected and disabling condition. As four diagnostic criteria sets for a grief disorder have been proposed, their similarities and differences need to be elucidated.
Methods
Participants were family members bereave...
Military service deaths result from a variety of causes but most are sudden and violent. Bereaved military family members appear to share similar outcomes to civilians who are faced with sudden and violent deaths, and a small but significant number of military family survivors suffer with persistent and impairing grief. Bereaved military families r...
Recent theory and empirical research suggest that child neglect is a heterogeneous phenomenon characterized by various types. This study examined family risk factors associated with five neglect types including failure to provide physical needs, lack of supervision, emotional neglect, moral-legal neglect, and educational neglect in 390 substantiate...
Increases in combat deployments have been associated with rises in rates of child neglect in U.S. military families. Although various types of child neglect have been described in military families, it is unknown whether deployment status is associated with specific types of child neglect and whether other factors, such as substance misuse, play a...
Knowledge about the effect of a US service member's death on surviving family members is limited. In order to identify their grief-related health care needs, a first step is to identify the characteristics of persistent and elevated grief in a military family sample. The present study identified military family members (n = 232) bereaved more than...
BACKGROUND: U.S. military service members die from a variety of causes (i.e., accidents, combat, illnesses, homicide, suicide, and terrorism) while on duty and in greater numbers during times of war, leaving behind bereaved dependent family members. Identifying characteristics of these dependent families improves our understanding of their unique n...
Background:
Preventing child maltreatment fatalities is a critical goal of the U.S. society and the military services. Fatality review boards further this goal through the analysis of circumstances of child deaths, making recommendations for improvements in practices and policies, and promoting increased cooperation among the many systems that ser...
This volume focuses on the culture of the U.S. Army. Many of the major points also apply to other military services. The concepts are important for those who desire to understand U.S. Army culture for research - particularly those early in their careers. We hope that this book helps those interested in conducting research in the Army to better navi...
TO THE EDITOR: Smid and Boelen rightfully highlight the importance of identifying standards for diagnosing clinically impairing grief. This issue has been of clinical interest within the United States and internationally, leading to the proposed DSM-5 persistent complex bereavement disorder criteria, as well as newly defined ICD-11 criteria for a s...
Objective:
The purpose of this article was to examine the accuracy of DSM-5 proposed criteria for persistent complex bereavement disorder in identifying putative cases of clinically impairing grief and in excluding nonclinical cases. Performance of criteria sets for prolonged grief disorder and complicated grief were similarly assessed.
Method:...
Suspiciousness is usually classified as a symptom of psychosis, but it also occurs in depression and anxiety disorders. Though how suspiciousness overlaps with depression is not obvious, suspiciousness does seem to overlap with anxious apprehension and anxious arousal (e.g., verbal iterative processes and vigilance about environmental threat). Howe...
Anxiety is characterized by attentional biases to threat, but findings are inconsistent for depression. To address this inconsistency, the present study systematically assessed the role of co-occurring anxiety in attentional bias in depression. In addition, the role of emotional valence, arousal, and gender was explored. Ninety-two non-patients com...
Both creativity and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders have been associated with activation of remote semantic concepts, but this activation results in innovative output in one case and communication disturbances in the other. The present study examined the relationship between monitoring semantic information (which relies on executive brain function...
Individuals learn to read by gradually recognizing repeated letter combinations. However, it is unclear how or when neural mechanisms associated with repetition of basic stimuli (i.e., strings of letters) shift to involvement of higher-order language networks. The present study investigated this question by repeatedly presenting unfamiliar letter s...
An individual's self-reported abilities to attend to, understand, and reinterpret emotional situations or events have been associated with anxiety and depression, but it is unclear how these abilities affect the processing of emotional stimuli, especially in individuals with these symptoms. The present study recorded event-related brain potentials...
Although models of emotion have focused on the relationship between anger and approach motivation associated with aggression, anger is also related to withdrawal motivation. Anger-out and anger-in styles are associated with psychopathology and may disrupt the control of attention within the context of negatively valenced information. The present st...
Anxiety is characterized by cognitive biases, including attentional bias to emotional (especially threatening) stimuli. Accounts differ on the time course of attention to threat, but the literature generally confounds emotional valence and arousal and overlooks gender effects, both addressed in the present study. Nonpatients high in self-reported a...
Imaging studies show that in normal language correlated activity between anterior and posterior brain regions increases as the linguistic and semantic content (i.e., from false fonts, letter strings, pseudo words, to words) of stimuli increase. In schizophrenia however, disrupted functional connectivity between frontal and posterior brain regions h...
In the schizophrenia spectrum, cognitive functions such as perception, language, and attention have been shown to be adversely influenced by negative affect. The present study addressed three issues of specificity and one issue of mechanism regarding affect-related attentional disruption in schizotypy: (1) Is attentional disturbance from negative a...
Symptom heterogeneity within conventional diagnostic groups is fostering a growing focus on narrower symptom profiles to identify psychological and biological mechanisms in psychopathology. Positive symptoms of schizophrenia are associated with context maintenance deficits, which in turn have been linked to frontal-lobe function. Frontal- and tempo...
Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to examine the relationship between processing of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli and activity in prefrontal cortex. Twenty volunteers identified the colors in which pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant words were printed. Pleasant words prompted more activity bilaterally in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) than di...
Negatively valenced stimuli foster cognitive impairment in schizotypy and schizophrenia. To identify relevant brain mechanisms, the authors had 16 positive-schizotypy and 16 control participants perform an emotional Stroop task, judging the ink color of negative and neutral words during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regional brain...
Schizotypal personality is characterized by a variety of traits, such as magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, and anhedonia. Factor analytic studies have shown that these characteristics tend to cluster into at least two separate dimensions (positive and negative schizotypy). Schizotypy is associated with vulnerability to schizophrenia...
The tendency to falsely recognize items as ones previously presented is increased in patients with frontal lesions and in older participants, whereas patients with medial temporal lobe damage may display such poor memory that they are not especially susceptible to false recognition. Since patients with schizophrenia are often compared to these grou...
Patients with schizophrenia frequently display problems in tasks demanding working memory. In a previous study, we examined short-term memory (STM) for serial order by having participants recall lists of letters from the first item to the last item in the order in which they were presented, and we examined the types of errors made (e.g., omissions,...
Schizophrenic patients generate fewer words than healthy controls during verbal fluency tasks. The structure of output may explain why patients generate fewer exemplars.
Twenty-four healthy controls and 24 patients with schizophrenia participated in six, 3 min semantic fluency tasks. In a subsequent session, participants were given cards, each prin...
Printout. Thesis (A.M.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 24-33).
Projects
Projects (4)
www.militarysurvivorstudy.org
The National Military Family Bereavement Study is the first large scientific study of the impact of a U.S. service member death on surviving family members. The research is being conducted by Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress (CSTS) in Bethesda, Maryland. The multi-disciplinary research team is led by Stephen J. Cozza, M.D., Associate Director of CSTS/Director of the Child and Family Program.
The death of a family member is a life-changing event for the entire family. Although bereavement eventually occurs in every family, not all bereaved persons grieve in the same way. Surviving members of military families may offer a unique perspective to understanding grief. From the initial distress of notification to longer-term challenges, family members face difficult emotional and practical issues possibly related to distinctive characteristics of military death. However, families impacted by a U.S. military death may also possess unique protective factors that affect their bereavement process and experience of loss.
There is a lack of substantive research on the impact of the death of a family member serving in the U.S. military. The need to study individual and family bereavement when a U.S. military service member dies is critical to understanding the experience of grief and loss in this unique survivor population.
This study’s findings will help to provide a scientific basis to inform policies effecting survivor care. This study seeks to better understand the impact of a service member’s death on his or her family of origin and family of procreation. The study investigates the impact of community support and services on the bereaved and how available resources impact resilience or vulnerability in surviving families. Finally, this study builds on the growing evidence addressing the intersection of grief and trauma and its effects on military family member's bereavement process.
