Current research on widowhood: devastation and human resilience.

A s of 2010, there were more than 14 million widowed persons in the U.s. population—nearly 3 million men and well more than 11 million women (U.s. Bureau of the Census, 2012, Table 57). About 13% of men and 40% of women aged 65 and older, and 57% of women aged 75 and older, are widows. This is, of course, just a single snapshot in time; nearly half of the population necessarily experience widowhood during their lifetimes. The only ways of avoiding it are to never marry, to divorce and never remarry, or to predecease your spouse. And widowhood is primarily a late-life experience: more than three quarters of all widowed persons are aged 65 or older. so it is not surprising that widowhood has attracted the attention of gerontologi-cal researchers virtually since the inception of the discipline and continues to do so. Over the years, I have noted with interest how many articles on widowhood begin with a citation to Holmes and Rahe (1967) to the effect that widowhood is perhaps the most distressing and difficult experience of people's lives. This tradition continues with several of the articles in this collection. To my knowledge, this statement has never provoked disagreement. But some close scrutiny and some nuanced qualifications may be needed. The extremely distressing nature of widowhood is most often examined within the domain of psychological well-being. Two thirds of the articles in this special issue (10 of 15) take some form or forms of psychological well-being as a dependent variable, continuing a long tradition of research. It is encouraging to see that all of these studies have moved beyond the initial question of how and how much widows differ from married people on depression, life satisfaction, and other dimensions of psychological well-being. We are now asking more sophisticated questions about how different categories of the population are differentially affected. Cheng, Chan, Li, and Leung show that widowhood is more problematic in several ways for Chinese elders who are childless than for their counterparts who are parents. Holland, Thompson, Rozalski, and Lichtenthal look at how trajectories of regret over the marital relationship influence grief and depression among widows. Pitzer and Bergeman compare widows with different patterns of synchrony between positive and negative affect. Hahn, Cichy, small, and Almeida show how widowed and married persons have different experiences of daily stress-ors (not always favoring the married), and how they react …