Attentional Bias and Complicated Grief: A Primed Dot-Probe Task with Emotional Faces

We used a dot-probe task to examine attentional biases toward emotional stimuli among three groups: conjugally bereaved1.5–3 years post-loss with or without Complicated Grief (CG) and a sample of demographically similar married participants. Each trial was preceded by a subliminal prime of the spouse's name or the spouse's name scrambled (neutral). Only CG participants demonstrated significant attentional biases. When primed with their (deceased) spouse's name, CG participants attended away from closed-mouth sad faces, and in the neutral condition attended away from happy faces. Because over half of the CG participants also met criteria for MDD (n = 14), we repeated these analyses examining co-morbid MDD with CG. The same findings emerged for sad faces in the deceased condition and happy faces in the neutral condition. These findings extend previous research on CG, demonstrating that CG and co-morbid CG with MDD involves distinct attentional problems specifically related to grief symptomatology.