Grief comes with its own 'what ifs'
Express-News Staff Writer
| A little more than two years ago, millions of Americans woke
in the early hours of the morning to mourn an English princess in a
massive outpouring of grief that astonished many observers.
By one estimate about 50 million people in this country watched the funeral of Princess Diana on television that Saturday in September 1997. Scores of newspaper and magazine articles and TV specials centered on the popular young woman's storybook life, her grace and beauty, her troubled marriage and divorce from Prince Charles and, finally, her death in a gruesome car accident in Paris. |
 |
Here and in England and around the world, ordinary people, men and women who never knew the princess, wept as if they had lost a family member or close friend as they viewed the solemn procession move from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey for the funeral service. A million people lined the streets of London, the largest such crowd since World War II. One study said the rate of people in Great Britain seeking treatment for depression increased after her death.
Why this extraordinary show of flowers, memorials and sadness from millions of strangers?
Part of it may have been the endearing public image of the celebrity royal, her works for AIDS and land-mine removal, her obvious joy in raising two boys.
But, two researchers believe they have found a larger answer to that "why" in yet another question: What if?
After the second anniversary of Diana's death ÷ and after another national wave of grief at the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law in a small-plane crash ÷ they submitted their findings for publication.
"We found that people respond strongly to these events because such tragedies encourage counterfactual thinking ÷ 'what-if' thinking," says David R. Pillow, associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "What the media does is tend to focus on stories that deal with how the outcome might have been different. That type of thinking has a long history in the (research) literature with amplifying emotions."
The more media exposure, the more what-if thinking. The more what-if thinking ÷ What if Diana's driver hadn't been drinking? What if she had been wearing a seat belt? ÷ the deeper the emotional reactions.
Pillow conducted the research with colleague Mary Ellen McNaughton Cassill, an assistant professor and clinical psychologist. She was already studying the relationship between stress and the media, especially the almost instant coverage of negative events and the huge volume of information that assaults people in the media and on the Internet.
"Traditionally, stresses were tied to bad things that happened to you, directly," Cassill explains. "The media has changed that. (Now) people are responding to media stories with anxiety and depression. Because people are lonely or bored or unhappy, they end up getting caught up in media stories. You can know a whole lot about people through these stories. You feel you know them, so you come up with this virtual-reality emotion."
After Diana's death, Pillow and Cassill teamed up to question 222 undergraduate psychology students at UTSA, ages 17 to 44. The majority of subjects were women ÷ most students taking psychology are female. Participants were asked to describe their emotional responses after Diana's death, in words ranging from a simple "upset" to "anxious," "saddened" and "depressed."
They were also asked about how much print and broadcast news coverage they took in during the days and weeks after the tragedy. And, they were questioned about any perceived similarity they had in relation to the princess. Finally, researchers assessed the extent of counterfactual, what-if, thinking among subjects, ruminations that mentally undo the tragic event by changing some piece of the story.
You don't have to be a member of British royalty or glamorous celebrity to perceive a similarity with Diana. It could involve some small point of connection ÷ being a young woman or a young mother; having experienced an eating disorder or gone through spousal infidelity or divorce or dealt with difficult in-laws.
Pillow says the notion that perceived similarity is a key factor in determining interest and feelings has strong support in social psychology. It can't be ignored.
Still, he decided to do the research after he heard a discussion on National Public Radio about why the death of Diana elicited so much more emotion than Mother Teresa's death, which occurred around the same time. The conclusion: Many had a sense of connection with the princess that they didn't have with the saintly, 87-year-old Nobel Prize winner.
"But, I knew there had to be more to it than that," the social psychologist says.
His research indicates it is the what-if ruminating surrounding Diana.
"With Mother Teresa you can't generate counterfactual thinking. She was an older person. You're prepared for her death."
Subjects who perceived themselves as similar to Diana tended to soak up many hours of media coverage, but they felt bad even if they didn't.
More interesting, the data shows that even subjects who didn't have any perceived similarity with Diana were affected by the many articles and TV stories.
As Pillow says, "If they watched a lot of the coverage, they ended up feeling bad, and they ended up with a lot of the same thought processes as those who perceived themselves as similar."
Actually, what-if thinking is very useful, Pillow points out. For one thing, it helps us identify causes of negative outcomes so we can try to avoid them in the future ÷ in Diana's case, don't get into a car with a drunken driver; in Kennedy's, use great caution flying small private planes. Research shows people generally don't use what-if thinking with events outside human control ÷ weather or natural disasters. Also, such counterfactual thinking can improve mood.
Pillow cites one study that found bronze medal-winning athletes were happier than silver medalists.
Second-place competitors find it easy to say, "If I had changed one thing, I might have the gold."
That makes for a more negative mood. By contrast, a runner who comes in third says, "It could have been worse. I could have not placed at all."
With the start of the new semester, Pillow and Cassill will begin questioning subjects on Kennedy's tragic death. "There we expect to see more what-might-have-been thinking," he says, a variation of what-if.
In other words: Had he lived, the young Kennedy might have gone into politics, might have run for president. He might have had children and carried on his father's line.
Meanwhile, Cassill is preparing her study of the media and anxiety and depression for separate publication. She starts with a seeming contradiction. "Why, in a population that lives in a really prosperous environment, with a longer life span and better health care and more access to good things ÷ why is stress one of our major problems? Why is this the age of anxiety?"
Part of the answer lies in how we perceive the world ÷ often via a TV screen.
"The media is such a pervasive part of our lives now that it's actually serving as a source of stress, independent of things that happen in your life. So you can experience stress about something you saw in the media," says Cassill, who teaches stress management.
The overload of graphic news reports on school violence and disaster takes its toll, she adds. "Each time one of these things comes across our radar screen we start worrying about what-if this happened to me and my family? It constantly gets into theft of resources."
It is not only that we are hit by multiple stories about terrible events, such as the Jewish Community Center shooting in California and the earthquake in Turkey.
"But we are hit with graphic texts and pictures that are designed to evoke deep emotional responses," observes Stevan Hobfoll, professor of psychology at Kent State University. "One of the aspects of traumatic stress is to have a traumatic visual image, and the news goes right to the edge, in terms of the degree to which they can show something horrific."
Hobfoll, author of "Stress, Culture and Community," says people are more anxious and stressed because of these images, particularly if they can relate to it personally ÷ having children in day care centers or school, for example.
"What a lot of this does is set up a world where you feel there is doom all around you," Hobfoll explains. Media coverage of the deaths of Diana and Kennedy helped set up just such an emotional platform. And, as Pillow and Cassill say, that made real for many people their own mortality and raised anxiety.
The question struck home: What if?
Monday, Oct 11, 1999
(Story published in the San Antonio Express News)