“Millions of people mourn Queen Elizabeth – how does science explain the mechanisms of mourning a public figure?” This is the question posed by the British magazine Nature a few days before the funeral of the Queen of the United Kingdom, on September 19.
In reality, most research on bereavement focuses on the loss of a parent or loved one, rarely a public figure. It must be said that testing hypotheses around bereavement and finding quantitative answers is a challenge. “It’s not as if we have a cerebral zone of mourning whose activity we could measure under certain conditions”, warns philosopher Louise Richardson, co-director of a project at the University of York, UK, entitled “Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience”.
“Grieving is a fairly simple concept, but it is a very complicated process”, adds Katherine S