OMEGA, Vol. 56(4) 331-348, 2007-2008

PROBLEMATIC EMOTIONS AND MATERNAL GRIEF

PETER BARR
Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, Sydney, Australia
JOANNE CACCIATORE
Arizona State University, Phoenix

ABSTRACT

The study was an empirical examination of the relation of personality proneness to “problematic social emotions”—envy (Dispositional Envy Scale),
jealousy (Interpersonal Jealousy Scale), and shame and guilt (Personal
Feelings Questionnaire-2)—to maternal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale-33)
following miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or infant/child death. The
441 women who participated in the study were enrolled from the Website,
e-mail contact lists, and parent support groups of an organization that offers
information and support to bereaved parents. All four problematic emotions
were positively correlated with maternal grief. Envy, jealousy, and guilt
made significant unique contributions to the variance in maternal grief.
Overall, time lapse since the loss and the four problematic emotion predispositions explained 43% of the variance in maternal grief following child
bereavement.

Mothers’ narrative accounts of grief following miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal
death, or infant/child death indicate they may be deeply troubled by what have
been referred to as the “problematic social emotions” (Tangney & Salovey,
1999), namely shame, guilt, envy, and jealousy (Borg & Lasker, 1989; Kohner &
Henley, 2001). However, the following first-person accounts cited by Borg and
331
! 2008, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.
doi: 10.2190/OM.56.4.b
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Lasker (1989) and Kohner and Henley (2001), suggest that grieving mothers may
not be aware that one or more problematic emotion may be informing their grief.
I lost all sense of worth, felt useless and had no confidence in anything I
did. Most of all, I now know, I never felt worthy of giving myself any praise.
I felt a failure, and I tried to carry on as normal to compensate for failing
everyone else (Kohner & Henley, 2001, p. 74).

The sense of worthlessness and powerlessness and the global devaluation of
the self (“I felt a failure”) expressed by this grieving mother are typical manifestations of shame (Lewis, 1971; Nathanson, 1987; Tangney, 1995). Although
the mother may have been aware of her underlying shame feelings, the aversive
nature of the emotion and the reluctance to admit shame’s presence (Retzinger,
1995) posit the possibility she or others may have concluded she suffered from
low self-esteem and depression without realizing that “shame is the affectivecognitive state of low self-esteem” (Lewis, 1987, p. 39).
I thought I was being punished, that I had caused her to be born early because
I had a cold and was constantly coughing. I felt totally useless and unneeded
and convinced that I was a terrible mother (Borg & Lasker, 1989, p. 74).

In this statement, the grieving mother of a premature infant who died in the
newborn period portrayed the hallmarks of chronic self-reviling guilt—a
disproportionate and/or irrational responsibility for an imagined transgression,
accompanied by a morbid fear of punishment (Bybee & Quiles, 1998; Cullberg,
1971; Freud, 1961/1930; Harder, 1995; Kugler & Jones, 1992). Although the
mother was probably aware of feeling guilty about something she did (“constantly
coughing”) that in her mind caused the premature birth and subsequent death,
she or others may not have appreciated her shame-related characterological
self-blame (“I was a terrible mother”), which often accompanies and aggravates
guilt-related behavioral self-blame (Janoff-Bulman, 1979; Lewis, 1971; Tangney,
Burggraf, & Wagner, 1995; Weiner, 1986) and may be more responsible than
guilt for psychological symptoms (Bybee & Quiles, 1998; Harder, 1995; Tangney
& Dearing, 2002).
There are mothers who drink, smoke and take drugs in their pregnancies
but they still have healthy babies that survive. Then there are women like
me. I didn’t smoke, drink or take drugs in my pregnancy, I watched my diet
and I took care of myself, and look what happened. Life’s just so unfair
(Kohner & Henley, 2001, p. 76).

In the preceding reflection, the grieving mother’s belief that she had been
treated unjustly called forth her moral indignation, bitterness, and resentment.
However, she did not use the word envy and she may not have understood or
been prepared to acknowledge that she was perhaps envious of women who, in her
estimation, were less deserving in a life domain that was profoundly important to

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333

her own sense of self (Anderson, 2002; Furman, 1996; Smith, 1991; Smith,
Parrott, Diener, Hoyle, & Kim, 1999).
When I wake up, sympathetic faces walk past me, but . . . they will never
understand what I feel. It was a girl, they say. She should have lived, but . . .
she is dead. It’s an ‘accident.’ No. . . . For me, it’s failure, And jealousy. . . .
Why all the others and not me (Borg & Lasker, 1989, p. 13)?

Although the mother in this last narrative reported that she was jealous, her
sense of injustice (“Why all the others and not me?”) is more typical of envy
(Parrott & Smith, 1993), which according to the Oxford English Dictionary
is a “feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s
possessions, qualities, or luck,” rather than jealousy, which the dictionary defines
as “the consuming fear, suspicion, or belief that one is being or might be displaced
in someone’s affections” (Salovey, 1991). In fact, individuals frequently use
the word jealous(y) to describe the experience of envy and ordinarily one would
not expect an association between jealousy, as previously defined, and maternal
grief, since there is no apparent rival for the deceased child’s affections (Smith,
Kim, & Parrott, 1988). On the other hand, grieving mothers may be vulnerable
to the jealousy that may accompany the threat of loss occasioned by “high
family boundary ambiguity” (Boss & Greenberg, 1984). In other words, if the
grieving mother experiences her dead child as being psychologically present
but physically absent and/or her husband or partner as being physically present
but psychologically absent, she becomes vulnerable to the threat of loss occasioned by this ambiguity and she may describe the experience in terms of jealousy
(Hansen, 1991).
Negative emotions exist along a continuum from emotion states through moods
to emotion-based personality predispositions (Malatesta & Wilson, 1988), and
maladaptive personality traits based on shame, guilt, envy, or jealousy have been
shown to bias cognition and subsequent behavior in ways that denigrate the
self, disrupt social relationships, and promote various forms of psychopathology
(Bybee & Quiles, 1998; Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Farber, 1976a, 1976b; Harder,
1995; Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994; Neu, 1980; Smith et al., 1999; Sullivan, 1953;
Tangney et al., 1995; Tangney & Salovey, 1999). If Bonanno (2001) is correct
and “recovery [from bereavement] is most likely to occur when negative griefrelated emotions are regulated or minimized” (p. 493), then dysregulated personality traits based on one or more problematic emotions should have important
relationships with maternal grief. In support of this claim, previous research
has shown that personality guilt- and shame-proneness explain a substantial
proportion of the variance in maternal grief following perinatal bereavement
(Barr, 2004).
The relationship of dispositional envy and jealousy to maternal grief has not
been studied; however, the psychological properties that these emotions share
with shame and guilt, including negative valence, threat to the integrity of the self,

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perceived inferiority in relevant interpersonal domains, and destructive patterns
of social interaction (Anderson, 2002; Berke, 1987; Tangney & Salovey, 1999),
suggest that proneness to envy and, less certainly, proneness to jealousy may
have important relationships with maternal grief. Although difficult to access
in counseling because of their strongly aversive character, the recognition of
grief-related problematic emotions may be important because each member of
the constellation may be amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention (Anderson,
2002; Greenberg & Paivio, 1993; Harder & Greenwald, 2000; Raphael, Minkov,
& Dobson, 2001). Thus, the purpose of the present study was to empirically
examine the hypothesis that predispositional envy, jealousy, shame, and guilt are
related to each other and to maternal grief following miscarriage, stillbirth,
neonatal death, or infant/child death.
METHODS
Procedure
The study protocol was published on the Mothers in Sympathy and Support
(M.I.S.S.) Foundation Website from March 2005 through August 2006. Foundation members and affiliates were notified of the study through Internet links,
e-mail lists, parent support groups, and other bereaved parent organizations.
The study questionnaires could be completed online or downloaded, completed and mailed to the Foundation for online data entry. The data from the
HTML Web form were saved to a MySQL database on an Apache Web server
(Birnbaum, 2004).
Prospective participants were invited to take part in a study whose stated
intention was to understand the relation between “present thoughts and
feelings about your loss” (grief) and “feelings of longing and unfairness” (envy),
“personal feelings” (shame and guilt), and “security in relationship” (jealousy)
following bereavement from miscarriage, stillbirth, newborn death or infant/
child death—hereafter referred to as child death or bereavement. The study
was anonymous and no information was collected that might have identified
participants. The study involved no more than minimal-risk to participants’
well-being and their voluntary participation was considered to represent
informed consent.
The participants were asked to provide demographic information concerning
their sex, age, ethnicity, education, relationship status, and child bereavement
history. Thereafter in order, they completed self-report questionnaire measures
of grief (Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS-33); Potvin, Lasker, & Toedter, 1989),
envy (Dispositional Envy Scale (DES); Smith et al., 1999), shame and guilt
(Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 (PFQ-2); Harder & Zalma, 1990), and jealousy
(Interpersonal Jealousy Scale (IJS); Mathes & Severa, 1981).

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Participants
The PGS-33 was completed by 612 respondents, but only 464 of these completed the DES, PFQ-2, and IJS. The 441 women respondents who completed all
four questionnaires comprise the study population. The study women were not
statistically significantly different from the women who only completed the
PGS-33 with respect to their grief scores and the above-mentioned demographic
variables.
The women were aged from 19 to 54 years (M = 32.5, SD = 6.87). They reported
their ethnic origin as European-American (70.5%), African-American (1.8%),
Native-American (2.5%), Asian-American (0.7%), Hispanic (3.4%), and Other
(non-American, 21.1%). The women reported their level of education as
Year 11 or earlier (6.1%), high school diploma (28.3%), associate degree or
certificate (22.0%), bachelor’s degree (28.3%), master’s degree (10.2%), and
Ph.D. or advanced professional degree (5.0%). They described their relationship
status as married or cohabiting (90.2%), single (4.5%), separated (1.8%), and
divorced (3.4%).
Although a history of more than one child bereavement was common, the time
lapse since the most recent death (TRD) was the independent variable used in
the statistical analyses (Lasker & Toedter, 2000). The most recent category of
death with the total number of child deaths for the category in parentheses
was reported as miscarriage 67 (119), stillbirth 194 (489), neonatal death 78
(153), and infant or child death 102 (216). The median TRD was 8 months
(range 0–343 months).
Measures
Perinatal Grief Scale-33

The intensity of maternal grief was measured with the PGS-33 (Potvin et al.,
1989), which is a psychometrically valid and reliable 33-item self-report questionnaire with three factor-analyzed 11-item subscales referred to as Active
Grief, Difficulty Coping and Despair (Toedter, Lasker, & Alhadeff, 1988;
Toedter, Lasker, & Janssen, 2001). The Active Grief subscale contains items
that reflect anguish over the death of a baby, such as, “I feel empty inside.”
The Difficulty Coping subscale contains items that signify social withdrawal,
difficulty with normal everyday life activities and depression, such as, “I find
it difficult to make decisions since the baby died.” The Despair subscale
contains items concerned with existential feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, such as, “I try to laugh, but nothing seems funny anymore.” The questionnaire items are presented as statements to which participants respond on a
5-point Likert scale that ranges from 1 “Strongly agree” to 5 “Strongly disagree”
with a neutral midpoint. Thirty-one of the 33 items are negatively valenced
and these scores are reversed before summing the individual item scores to obtain

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the total and subscale scores such that higher scores indicate more intense grief.
Only the total PGS-33 score was used in the present study.
Women who had experienced the death of a child beyond the neonatal period
were included in the study and in order to accommodate this group the PGS-33
was modified with the permission of the scale’s authors and the word “baby” in
the item statements replaced with the compound word “baby/child.” The internal
reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s ") for the PGS-33 was .94 for the entire study
population and for the subgroup of women who reported the death of a child
beyond the neonatal period.
Dispositional Envy Scale

Women’s proneness to envy was measured with the DES (Smith et al., 1999),
which is a psychometrically valid and reliable 8-item self-report questionnaire that
captures the theoretically important characteristics of envy, namely
1. feelings of inferiority, such as, “The bitter truth is that I generally feel
inferior to others”;
2. feeling frustrated, such as, “It is so frustrating to see some people succeed
so easily”;
3. subjective injustice, such as, “It somehow doesn’t seem fair that some
people seem to have all the talent”; and
4. the frequency and intensity of envious feelings, such as, “No matter what
I do, envy always plagues me.”
The items are presented as statements to which participants respond on a 5-point
Likert scale that ranges from 1 “Strongly disagree” to 5 “Strongly agree” with a
neutral midpoint. The Cronbach’s " value for the DES was .90.
Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2

The PFQ-2 was used to measure women’s chronic shame- and guilt-proneness
(Harder & Zalma, 1990). The PFQ-2 is a psychometrically valid and reliable
self-report questionnaire with factor-analyzed shame (10 items) and guilt (6 items)
scales (Harder & Zalma, 1990). The shame-relevant and guilt-relevant words
or phrases used in the PFQ-2 were chosen for their distinguishing affective,
cognitive, and phenomenological characteristics (Harder & Lewis, 1987; Lewis,
1971). The shame items include “feeling ridiculous” and “feeling humiliated,”
whereas those pertaining to guilt include “mild guilt,” “remorse,” and “regret.”
Participants are presented with an emotion word or phrase and asked how frequently they experience the feeling on a 5-point Likert scale that ranges from
0 “Never experience” to 4 “Continuously or almost continuously experience”
without a neutral midpoint. The individual shame and guilt item scores are

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337

summed to give total scores for chronic shame- and guilt-proneness. The respective Cronbach’s " values for PFQ-2 Shame and Guilt were .83 and .80.
Interpersonal Jealousy Scale

The women’s proneness to jealousy was measured with the IJS (Mathes &
Severa, 1981), which is a psychometrically valid and reliable 28-item single
factor self-report questionnaire measure of jealousy, defined as the “negative
emotion resulting from actual or threatened loss of love to a rival” (Mathes &
Severa, 1981, p. 24). The IJS measures “romantic” relationship jealousy in the
following domains:
1. infidelity, such as, “The thought of my partner kissing someone else drives
me up the wall”;
2. popularity, such as, “If someone of the opposite sex lit up at the sight of
my partner, I would become uneasy”;
3. untrustworthiness, such as, “If my partner were to become very close to
someone of the opposite sex, I would feel very unhappy and/or angry”;
4. past relationships, such as, “If I saw a photograph of my partner and an
old date I would feel unhappy”; and
5. indifference, such as, “If my partner were to accidentally call me by the
wrong name, I would become furious.”
The questionnaire items are presented as statements to which participants
respond on a 9-point Likert scale that ranges from 1 “Absolutely false,
disagree completely” to 9 “Absolutely true, agree completely” with a neutral
midpoint. Seven items are positively valenced and their scores are reversed so
that higher aggregate scores signify greater jealousy. The Cronbach’s " value for
the IJS was .93.
STATISTICS
The relative mean substitution method was used to manage the few missing
values in the Likert scales (Raaijmakers, 1999). The relative mean substitution
method involved calculating a participant’s relative position in the dataset by
dividing the mean of the participant’s valid data by the mean of the valid data for
the remainder of the participants. A missing value in an item was estimated by
multiplying the aforementioned ratio by the mean of the valid data for the
particular item.
The TRD variable was strongly positively skewed and the values were logarithmically transformed (Log-TRD) to normalize the distribution (Tabachnick
& Fidell, 2001).
PGS-33 Grief was the dependent variable and the four emotion-based personality predispositions were the independent variables in a 5-step hierarchical

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multiple regression analysis. Log-TRD was introduced at Step 1, DES Envy
was introduced at Step 2, IJS Jealousy was introduced at Step 3, PFQ-2 Shame
was introduced at Step 4, and PFQ-2 Guilt was introduced at Step 5. DES Envy
was entered before IJS Jealousy and PFQ-2 Shame was entered before PFQ-2
Guilt because it was considered theoretically important to control jealousy for
the variance due to envy and guilt for the variance due to shame, thereby
obtaining measures of “pure” jealousy and “pure” guilt (Ferguson & Crowley,
1997; Harder, 1995; Smith et al., 1988; Tangney, 1996). Envy and jealousy
were entered before shame and guilt because the former were the problematic
emotions of particular interest in the present study and for this reason they were
given first preference in the statistical allocation of shared variance (Ferguson
& Stegge, 1998). SPSS for Windows version 14.0 was used for the statistical
computations (SPSS, 2005).
RESULTS
The descriptive statistics for PGS-33 Grief, DES Envy, IJS Jealousy and PFQ-2
Shame and Guilt are presented in Table 1. The value for PGS-33 was similar to
the values reported by Toedter et al. (2001). The DES individual item values
and the total values for PFQ-2 Shame and Guilt, and IJS Jealousy were somewhat
higher than those reported by Smith et al. (1999), Harder and Zalma (1990) and
Mathes et al. (1982), respectively, but, nevertheless, they were within an SD
of these values.
The zero-order correlation matrix for grief, Log-TRD, and the four problematic emotions is shown in Table 2. Log-TRD had a moderate negative correlation with grief (r = –.36). There was a moderate correlation between envy
and jealousy (r = .43) and a large correlation between shame and guilt (r = .67).
Envy had a large correlation with shame (r = .60) and a moderate correlation with

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics for Grief, Envy, Jealousy,
Shame, and Guilt

PGS-33 Grief
DES Envy

M

SD

109.8

23.09

22.0

8.14

140.6

34.39

PFQ-2 Shame

18.2

6.35

PFQ-2 Guilt

12.7

4.52

IJS Jealousy

Note: N = 441. DES = Dispositional Envy Scale, IJS = Interpersonal Jealousy Scale,
PFQ-2 = Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2, PGS-33 = Perinatal Grief Scale-33.

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339

Table 2. Zero-Order Correlation Matrix for Grief, Log-TRD, Envy,
Jealousy, Shame, and Guilt
Grief
Grief

Log-TRD

Envy

Jealousy

Shame

—
–.36***

—

Envy

.44***

–.12*

—

Jealousy

.36***

–.12**

.43***

—

Shame

.48***

–.08

.60***

.43***

—

Guilt

.51***

–.04

.48***

.32***

.67***

Log-TRD

Guilt

—

Note: N = 441. Log-TRD = Log time lapse since most recent death.
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (2-tailed).

guilt (r = .48), whereas jealousy compared with envy had smaller though still
moderate correlations with shame (r = .43) and guilt (r = .32).
Partialing out or statistically controlling for the variance due to the confounding
emotion allowed for a more discriminating evaluation of the correlation of each
problematic emotion with grief. In this regard, envy controlled for jealousy had a
moderate correlation with grief (r = .34), whereas jealousy controlled for envy had
a small correlation with grief (r = .21). There were small correlations between
shame controlled for guilt and grief (r = .21) and guilt controlled for shame and
grief (r = .29).
The result of the hierarchical multiple regression of grief on Log-TRD, envy,
jealousy shame and guilt is shown in Table 3. The multiple R-value was statistically significant at each step. Log-TRD explained 13% of the variance in grief
(R2 = .13, p < .001). Envy controlled for the variance due to Log-TRD explained
a further 16% of the variance in grief (#R2 = .16, p < .001). Jealousy controlled
for the variance due to Log-TRD and envy explained a further 3% of the variance
in grief (#R2 = .03, p < .001). Shame controlled for the variance due to Log-TRD,
envy and jealousy explained a further 5% of the variance in grief (#R2 = .05,
p < .001). Finally, guilt controlled for the variance due to Log-TRD, envy,
jealousy and shame explained a further 6% of the variance in grief (#R2 = .06,
p < .001). The following variables made significant unique contributions to the
variance in grief with all variables entered in the regression (see Table 3):
Log-TRD ($ = –.31 , p < .001), envy ($ = .14, p < .01), jealousy ($ = .11, p < .05)
and guilt ($ = .32, p < .001). Shame did not make a statistically significant unique
contribution to the variance in grief ($ = .10, p = .06). Overall, time lapse since
the most recent child death and the four problematic emotion predispositions
explained 43% of the variance in maternal grief following child bereavement.

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Table 3. Hierarchical Multiple Regression of Grief on Envy,
Jealousy, Shame, and Guilt
Variable

B

SE B

$

t

Step 1
Log-TRD

–12.95

1.59

–.36

–8.16***

Step 2
Log-TRD
Envy

–11.25
1.15

1.44
.12

–.32
.41

–7.80***
10.03***

Step 3
Log-TRD
Envy
Jealousy

–10.77
.94
.12

1.42
.12
.03

–.30
.33
.18

–7.58***
7.57***
4.03***

Step 4
Log-TRD
Envy
Jealousy
Shame

–10.86
.51
.08
1.08

1.37
.14
.03
.18

–.30
.18
.11
.30

–7.94***
3.67***
2.62**
6.12***

Step 5
Log-TRD
Envy
Jealousy
Shame
Guilt

–11.10
.40
.07
.38
1.66

1.31
.13
.03
.20
.25

–.31
.14
.11
.10
.32

–8.50***
2.96**
2.67**
1.90
6.56***

Note: Step 1: R = .36, F(1, 439) = 66.67, p < .001, R2 = .13. Step 2: R = .54, F(2, 438) =
91.21, p < .001, R2 = .29, #R2 = .16, F change = 100.62, p < .001. Step 3: R = .56,
F(3, 437) = 68.35, p < .001, R2 = .32, #R2 = .03, F change = 16.27, p < .001. Step 4: R = .61,
F(4, 436) = 64.88, p < .001, R2 = .37, #R2 = .05, F change = 37.41, p < .001. Step 5: R = .66,
F(5, 435) = 65.50, p < .001, R2 = .43, #R2 = .06, F change = 42.98, p < .001. Log-TRD = Log
time lapse since most recent death.
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (2-tailed).

DISCUSSION
Personality envy- and jealousy-proneness were moderately correlated with
maternal grief, and both emotions made statistically significant unique contributions to the variance in maternal grief, even though “when both emotions are
present, they almost inevitably lose their separate identities” (Farber, 1976a,
p. 41). Envy compared with jealousy had a stronger correlation with maternal grief
and made a larger unique contribution to its variance. The moderate zero-order

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341

correlation of envy with grief persisted when envy was controlled for jealousy,
whereas the moderate zero-order correlation between jealousy and grief was
reduced to a small correlation when jealousy was controlled for envy. These
partial correlation findings were not unexpected, since the present study confirmed previous research that has shown envy and jealousy covary (Smith et al.,
1999) and because individuals are known to describe jealousy and envy in terms of
jealousy, but to rarely describe jealousy in terms of envy (Smith et al., 1988).
Envy was second to chronic guilt in the magnitude of the unique contribution
made by the problematic emotions to the variance in grief. The fact that dispositional envy was correlated with maternal grief following the death of a
child was in keeping with mothers’ perception that reproductive loss represents
“failure” (Furman, 1978; Leon, 1992) and the notion that envy occurs “when the
disadvantaged person has suffered a recent setback, when the advantaged person
is similar on comparison-related attributes, and when the domain of comparison
is important to the self” (Smith et al., 1999, pp. 1007-1008). Although not directly
addressed in the present study, and perhaps an unlikely possibility, bereaved
mothers may have been disconcerted by fear of envy of the dead (Foster, 1972),
since “unresolved and unrecognized envy, often experienced in projection, is
frequently a clinically important feature of persistent bereavement reactions”
(Hobson, 1985, p. 128).
The fact that the Interpersonal Jealousy Scale (IJS) is a self-report measure of
proneness to “romantic” jealousy (Mathes & Severa, 1981), rather than other
types of jealousy occasioned by the threat of loss to a rival in a non-romantic
relationship (Bevan, 2004; Hansen, 1991; Parrott, 1991), is a potential shortcoming of the present study (White & Mullen, 1989). However, even though
self-report measures of jealousy, including the IJS, focus on romantic relationships (White & Mullen, 1989), jealousy as a personality trait or disposition
“should generalize across situations [and] items assessing dispositional jealousy
attempt to sample ‘jealousy’ . . . in different domains, not just the romantic
context” (White & Mullen, 1989, p. 290).
The relation between jealousy and grief is not readily understood in terms of the
mother’s dyadic relationship with the dead child, since the presence of jealousy
usually infers that a valued relationship is threatened by a real or imagined rival
(White & Mullen, 1989). There are, however, several plausible explanations
for the positive correlation between proneness to jealousy and grief. First, the
relationship between jealousy and grief may have been factitious because of a
shared correlation with an unmeasured variable, such as an adult attachment
style (Collins & Read, 1990; Guerrero, 1998; Sharpsteen & Kirkpatrick, 1997;
Shaver & Tancredy, 2001). Second, the measures of grief and jealousy may have
captured the same primary emotions—fear, anger and/or sadness, which are
commonplace in both grief (Bowlby, 1975, 1981) and jealousy (Hupka, 1984;
Sharpsteen, 1991), particularly if the IJS lacked ecological validity in bereaved
women. In any event, the face validity of the PGS-33 and IJS scale items and the

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small correlation between jealousy controlled for envy and grief suggest the
questionnaires measured different constructs and that grief and jealousy are
separate but related compound emotions or “passions” evoked by loss (Solomon,
1993). Third, grieving mothers’ jealousy may have been aroused by their perception that the infant was in danger of being lost to an abstract rather than
actual rival, such as a personification of death or a deity, since “when loved
persons are not available to us and they are (thought or felt to be) available to
others, their absence will tend to be experienced as ‘loss to a rival’” (Neu, 1980,
p. 428). The final and perhaps most cogent explanation for the correlation
between jealousy and grief relates to the possibility that jealousy was evoked by
the threat of loss in a situation of “high family boundary ambiguity” (Boss &
Greenberg, 1984; Hansen, 1991). According to Boss and Greenberg (1984),
high family boundary ambiguity exists when a person in a valued relationship
experiences the important other as being psychologically present but physically
absent or, alternatively, psychologically absent but physically present. If the
deceased child is psychologically present but physically absent in the mother’s
world, the threat of loss occasioned by this ambiguity may cause her to feel jealous
(Hansen, 1991). Similarly, differences in gender roles and stereotypes may prompt
a grieving mother to perceive her husband or partner as physically present but
psychologically absent (Doka & Martin, 2001), thereby creating an ambiguous
state of affairs that poses a threat to her relationship that she may describe as
jealousy (Hansen, 1991).
Personality shame- and guilt-proneness had respective moderate and large
correlations with grief and, notably, chronic guilt was the problematic emotion
that made the largest unique contribution to the variance in maternal grief. The
PFQ-2 measure of chronic guilt-proneness has been correlated with psychological
symptoms (Bybee & Quiles, 1998; Harder, 1995) and may be qualitatively
similar to the self-reviling guilt that Freud (1961/1930) and others (Buber, 1957;
Lewis, 1979; Prosen, Clark, Harrow, & Fawcett, 1983) have associated with
psychopathology, and Cullberg (1971) and others (Miles & Demi, 1986) have
related to maternal grief. The relationship of (PFQ-2) chronic shame- and guiltproneness to grief in this study was similar to that reported in more depth in a
study of perinatally bereaved Australian mothers (Barr, 2004), thereby suggesting the relation of chronic shame- and guilt-proneness to maternal grief may
be generalizable, at least across similar cultures. The theoretical possibility that
guilt “fused” with shame (Lewis, 1971; Tangney et al., 1995), rather than guilt
per se (Bybee & Quiles, 1998), might determine the correlation with maternal
grief was offset by statistically controlling guilt for shame in the partial correlation
and hierarchical multiple regression analyses (Ferguson & Stegge, 1998; Harder,
1995). On the downside, the fact that shame did not make a unique contribution
to the variance in maternal grief may have been an unwanted consequence of the
partialing procedure, whereby shame’s shared variance with grief was allocated to
guilt and/or envy (Ferguson & Stegge, 1998).

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343

There were potential disadvantages to the predominantly online method of
research used in this study, including the exclusion of participants who were
not computer literate, the possibility that some participants may have made
multiple submissions or responded unthoughtfully or insincerely, and the substantial participant drop-out rate (Reips, 2002). In addition, the self-report questionnaire nature of the study meant that it was susceptible to errors from respondent tendencies to agree, be indecisive, or prefer extreme responses (Baldwin,
2000; Rust & Golombok, 1999; Stone et al., 2000). Finally, participants may
have experienced difficulty identifying, distinguishing, and/or quantifying the
emotions under examination (Barrett & Campos, 1987; White & Mullen, 1989).
The foregoing concerns and the fact that the study participants were a convenience
sample of mostly well-educated computer literate European-American women
in their 30s suggest caution should be exercised in extrapolating the findings to
other populations of bereaved mothers.
Despite the preceding caveats, dispositional envy and jealousy, as well as shame
and guilt, showed significant correlations with maternal grief. Although the
cross-sectional and correlational nature of the study precludes any definite conclusion regarding direction of causality, the inherently stable nature of personality
traits make it more likely that maternal grief was aggravated by one or more
dispositional problematic emotion rather than proposing a causal relationship
in the opposite direction (Ekman & Davidson, 1994).
The vignettes presented in the introduction suggest that bereaved mothers
may not be aware that one or more problematic emotion attends their grief and
thus not be in a position to identify, express, reframe and assimilate these emotions
in a way that is functional, or at least neutral, and not pathogenic (Barrett &
Campos, 1987; Raphael et al., 2001; Tangney & Salovey, 1999). Although the
value of emotional disclosure in the amelioration of grief is arguable (Archer,
1999), particularly with regard to the value of expressing negative emotions
(Bonanno, 2001), one necessary but not sufficient condition for effective counseling should be the correct identification of each troublesome emotion, not
withstanding that shame and envy, in particular, may be difficult to identify
in everyday discourse and “analyze” in psychotherapy (Bourne, 1968; Farber,
1976a; Foster, 1972; Lewis, 1971; Retzinger, 1995).
In principle, emotion-focused therapy (Greenberg & Paivio, 1993) should
offer mothers the wherewithal to:
1. ameliorate envy by discouraging downward social comparisons and encouraging acceptance of unavoidable individual differences in advantage
(Anderson, 2002), thereby “giving up the sense of being victimized by
fate” (Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994, p. 30);
2. align jealousy with the notion of vigilance and the important evolutionary task of “jealously” guarding self-defining relationships (White &
Mullen, 1989);

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3. transform self-denigrating shame into a search for personal authenticity
(Lynd, 1958); and
4. disentangle behavior-based guilt from character-based shame (JanoffBulman, 1979; Weiner, 1986) and learn that guilt may be an empathyrelated prosocial emotion that motivates individuals to maintain or restore
supportive interpersonal relationships (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton,
1994; Tangney et al., 1995).
If bereaved mothers were to become more aware of their negative emotionbased personality predispositions, understand how these traits may adversely
affect their grief, and learn how to render them more functional and healthful,
they may come to realize that:
Our lives do not simply fall apart, they collapse in structured ways, and the
fault lines are marked by our concepts. Our ways of understanding and
describing our psychological states often reveal (and sometimes limit) the
potentials in those states themselves, the potentials for both development
and disorder (Neu, 1980, p. 428).

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Direct reprint requests to:
Dr. Peter Barr
Department of Neonatology
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead
Locked Bag 4001
Westmead, NSW, 2145
Australia
e-mail: peter@chw.edu.au