What the New Research Actually Found

What the New Research Actually Found

The study I have been thinking about is by a team of researchers in China and the UK (Zhou et al., 2025). It came out in February 2025 in a journal called Social Science & Medicine. Three connected studies, all looking at the same question — does the way we reflect on grief change how we carry it?

A small note before the details. The researchers worked with bereaved people. Specifically, adults who had lost a close family member or partner in the last five years and were still struggling. About 1 in 10 people who lose a loved one to natural causes will develop what is called prolonged grief disorder — a kind of grief that does not soften on its own and gets in the way of normal life (Djelantik et al., 2020). For people whose loss came suddenly or violently, the rate is closer to half. This is who the research is for.

Study One: A Survey of 207 People

The first study was just a careful survey. The team asked 207 bereaved adults about their grief, and about how they tended to think about their loss. Did they relive it as if they were back in the moment? Or did they observe it from a small distance, like a witness watching themselves?

The pattern was clear. People who naturally observed their grief from a small distance reported less severe grief symptoms. They also reported less grief rumination — the loop of repetitive, stuck thoughts about the loss, the unfairness of it, what could have been different (Eisma & Stroebe, 2017).

This was not new. An earlier study with bereaved children and teenagers had found something similar (Kaplow et al., 2018). Kids who used more distancing language when talking about their loss had fewer symptoms of trauma. The 2025 paper just added more weight to a pattern that researchers had been noticing for a while.

Study Two: One Quiet Sitting

The second study was a lab experiment with 45 people. Half were asked to recall their loss as if reliving it. The other half were asked to step back and observe themselves at that moment, from a small distance.

The people who observed themselves felt fewer negative emotions afterward. The people who relived the loss did not feel worse on the negative side, but they felt fewer positive ones too — the warm memories dimmed along with the painful ones.

I want to be careful here. This was one short session, with only 45 people. The effect was real but small. But it lined up with what other researchers had found. A 2015 study with veterans carrying trauma showed something similar. When the veterans reflected on their hardest memories from a small distance, their bodies showed less stress — slower heart rates, calmer breathing — than when they relived the moment (Wisco et al., 2015). The body, somehow, knows the difference.

Study Three: Three Days of Writing

The third study is the one that stayed with me.

The team worked with 31 people who were all carrying severe grief. Each person was asked to write for fifteen minutes a day, three days in a row, about their bereavement. Half wrote in the first person — I felt, I remember, I cannot believe. Half wrote in the third person, using their own name or he/she — Anna felt, Anna remembers, Anna cannot believe.

This was the same writing protocol that an earlier study had used (Park et al., 2016). In that earlier work, the effects of just three days of writing lasted up to six months.

Here is what happened in the new study. Both groups felt better. Both groups reported lower grief symptoms after the three days. Writing helped. Both kinds of writing helped.

But only the third-person group also broke free of the rumination loop. The same loop the survey had picked up in study one. When grief was looping, writing in the third person seemed to give people a way out of the loop that first-person writing did not.

The Bridge

This is the part that I keep returning to. Both kinds of writing helped people feel less grief. But only one of them quieted the loop. The next chapter is about why that small difference matters — and why I think it points to something true about reflection itself.

References

Djelantik, A. A. A. M. J., Smid, G. E., Mroz, A., Kleber, R. J., & Boelen, P. A. (2020). The prevalence of prolonged grief disorder in bereaved individuals following unnatural losses: Systematic review and meta-regression analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 265, 146–156.

Eisma, M. C., & Stroebe, M. S. (2017). Rumination following bereavement: An overview. Bereavement Care, 36(2), 58–64.

Kaplow, J. B., Wardecker, B. M., Layne, C. M., Kross, E., Burnside, A., Edelstein, R. S., & Prossin, A. R. (2018). Out of the mouths of babes: Links between linguistic structure of loss narratives and psychosocial functioning in parentally bereaved children. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 31(3), 342–351.

Park, J., Ayduk, Ö., & Kross, E. (2016). Stepping back to move forward: Expressive writing promotes self-distancing. Emotion, 16(3), 349–364.

Wisco, B. E., Marx, B. P., Sloan, D. M., Gorman, K. R., Kulish, A. L., & Pineles, S. L. (2015). Self-distancing from trauma memories reduces physiological but not subjective emotional reactivity among Veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder. Clinical Psychological Science, 3(6), 956–963.

Zhou, N., Ren, F., Cao, C., She, Z., Smith, K. V., & Xi, J. (2025). Can self-distancing benefit adjustment to bereavement? A multi-method investigation. Social Science & Medicine, 367, 117743.