Exploring deceased-related attention and memory in suicide and non-suicide bereavement through fMRI decoding

Motivation: Losing of a loved one to suicide is a uniquely difficult form of grief, often affecting a person’s ability to cope. It remains unclear what neural processes may cause intrusive thoughts to happen. Goal(s): To understand the processes that contribute to intrusive and spontaneous thoughts of loss. Approach: We trained a decoder to identify fMRI voxel-patterns associated with deceased-related attention and mental representations, which we then applied to another dataset acquired during mind-wandering to understand how these processes contribute to the occurrence of thoughts of loss. Results: Engagements of attention and memory increased during blocks where subjects reported having thought about their loss. Impact: The identification of attention and memory neural patterns in suicide related bereavement has the potential to recognize patients experiencing a poorer grief outcome and to help them improve grief trajectories