Relationship Category and Emotional Closeness, Essay Example

Regarding the experiment conducted by the researchers, it is clear that subjecting a person to  a traumatic experience during the course of activities imposes a high risk on their emotional  well-being. Connecting with  another person first time and getting to know them creates an emotional connection,  and learning about their death would certainly affect the participant.

Compared with the experience of playing with an infant,  I believe that the reaction of the participants would have been less severe. Infants are considered to be vulnerable and needing protection. The death of an infant always affects people greater emotionally than the death of a grown-up person. Grief intensity, on the other hand, depends on the type of relationship, as well. Servaty-Seib and Pistole created a study to reveal the correlation between emotional closeness and grief intensity. The authors state that there were “significant mean differences in past and present grief for higher versus lower closeness, regardless of relationship category” (Servaty-Seib and Pistole, 159). It is likely that by interacting with a vulnerable infant, the grief of the participants would have also been filled with self-blame.  While grown-ups are more capable of looking after themselves, the death of a child creates a greater level of grief. This stated, the experiment using infants would have created further ethical complications, provided that the researchers simply lied to the participants to measure their reactions. There would have been other methods for concluding the experiment in an ethical manner, for example studying parents who recently lost their infant child, making sure that the emotions and experiments were real and not triggered by scientists. That stated, in either case, the researchers triggered reactions based on unreal experiences, and this is unethical.

Works Cited

Servaty-Seib, Heather L., and M. Carole Pistole. “Adolescent grief: Relationship category and emotional closeness.” OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying 54.2 (2007): 147-167.