Mary-Frances O'Connor

Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, which investigates the effects of grief on the brain and the body. O’Connor earned a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2004 and completed a fellowship at UCLA. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychological Science, and featured in Newsweek, the New York Times, and The Washington Post. Having grown up in Montana, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona. For more information go to https://www.maryfrancesoconnor.com/

Articles:

Believing in Magical Thoughts

Believing in Magical Thoughts A few years ago, an older colleague of mine passed away. I spent some time with his widow in the months afterward. As a prominent sleep researcher, her husband had traveled quite often to attend academic conferences. Over dinner one night, she shook her head as she told me it just did not feel like he was gone. She was believing in magical thoughts. It felt as though her husband was just away on another trip and would walk through their door again at any minute. We hear this kind of statement quite often from those who […]

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Memory of a Death

Memory of a Death When a loved one has died, we have a memory of learning that they died. This memory of a death might be of the phone call informing you that your brother died. It’s etched in your mind with lots of detail—where you were in the dining room, what you were cooking, how hot it was in the room, the smell of onions. These are what we call episodic memories; they are detailed memories of a specific death. A Father is Dying Perhaps your memory of a death occurred because you were there when it happened. When […]

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