Paper in a Day Workshop: full day pre-conference workshop

Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) has recently been included in the text-revised 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2022). PGD is characterized by intense yearning and longing for the deceased as well as pre-occupations with thoughts and memories of the deceased. In addition, PGD symptoms encompass among others avoidance of reminders of the loss and loneliness. People who experience loss due to traumatic circumstances (e.g., accident, homicide, suicide) have
increased risk for PGD (Buur et al., 2024). PGD has mostly been studied using retrospective measures (e.g., rating symptoms experienced in the past month), which may lead to an overestimation of PGD severity (Lenferink et al., 2022). To overcome this, it may be useful to examine PGD symptoms in daily life, which can be done using experience sampling methodology (ESM). ESM not only reduces the likelihood of recall bias, but also captures how cognitive, behavioral, and affective responses interact over short periods of time. Ultimately, ESM data may revolutionize the way we understand and treat psychotrauma by bringing research and treatment into daily life (van Os et al., 2017). The current project will analyze and report on existing ESM data on PGD severity in daily life
collected among people confronted with non-traumatic and traumatic loss. Bereaved people were asked to monitor their reactions throughout the day for an extended period of time, 5 times a day for two weeks, resulting in up to 70 entries per person. The analysis of ESM data requires additional methodological considerations, as the data collected from the same person are not independent entries, which will be addressed in this workshop using multilevel modelling.
Possible research questions that can be answered within the scope of this project are as follows: ‘To what extent do PGD symptoms fluctuate in daily life?’, ‘To what extent does intensity of PGD symptoms differ between PGD symptoms assessed using retrospective measures versus ESM?’, and ‘To what extent is social context related to PGD symptoms in daily life?