Mary Frances O'Connor, Ph.D

Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona

Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, conducts studies to better understand the grief process both psychologically and physiologically. She is a leader in the field of complicated grief, a clinical condition in which people do not adjust to the acute feelings of grief and show increases in yearning, avoidance, and rumination. Her research focuses on the physiological correlates of emotion, in particular the wide range of physical and emotional responses during bereavement, including yearning and isolation. She believes that a clinical science approach toward the experience and mechanisms of grieving can improve interventions for prolonged grief disorder, newly included in the revised DSM-5.