The experience of grief in the head-injured adult

The current study attempted to assess the grief process in head-injured adults and to compare this with the grief process of individuals bereaved due to the death of a loved one. In addition, because grief often produces difficulty with cognitive processes, it was hypothesized that bereaved individuals would demonstrate impaired performance on neuropsychological tests of memory, attention, and reasoning ability. Significant differences between head-injured and bereaved individuals were found on only one clinical scale of the Grief Experience Inventory largely supporting the idea that grief among these individuals is similar. While a trend suggestive of the second hypothesis was found on tests of cognition, the head-injured and bereaved subjects differed significantly on all such tests with the exception of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and specific subtests of the California Verbal Learning Test.