Processes and content of narrative identity development in adolescence: Gender and well-being.

The present study examined narrative identity in adolescence (14–18 years) in terms of narrative content and processes of identity development. Age- and gender-related differences in narrative patterns in turning point memories and gender differences in the content and functions for sharing those memories were examined, as was the relationship between narrative patterns and self-esteem. The narrative patterns focused on were meaning-making (learning from past events) and emotionality of the narratives, specified as overall positive emotional tone and redemptive sequencing. Results showed an age-related increase in meaning-making but no gender differences in the degree of meaning-making. Results further showed that gender predicted self-esteem and that boys evidenced higher self-esteem. Emotionality also predicted self-esteem; this was especially true for redemption and for boys. In terms of telling functions, girls endorsed more relational reasons for telling memories than did boys. Results are discussed in terms of potential gendered and nongendered pathways for identity development in adolescence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

人本心理学与叙事研究

在20世纪80年代之后,人本心理学积极关注发展具体的研究方案。叙事研究即为其中一种。它强调人类生活经验即故事,故事的讲述就是一个建构自我、他人和世界意义的过程。通过对故事的分析来实现对参与者经验和行为的说明与理解。一方面叙事研究吸收了人本心理学的一些基本主张,另一方面,人本心理学家运用叙事方法进行研究,使得它不再流于理论倡导,而是融入到个人经验研究的具体实践,丰富、增进了心理学的质化研究方法。     

Late Adolescent Identity Development: Narrative Meaning Making and Memory Telling.

Personally important autobiographical memories are the smallest unit of the life story, which begins to emerge in adolescence. This study examined 2 features of self-defining memories in late adolescence, the meaning made of the memories to garner an understanding of the narrative construction of identity as a life story and how those memories were told with an emphasis on the functions for telling and audiences to understand the social component of narrative identity development. For late adolescents (N=185), meaning was infrequently reported for the entertainment function in comparison with the self-explanation function. At later ages, adolescents' audiences were more likely to be peers, and at earlier ages, adolescents' audiences were more likely to be parents. Discussion focuses on the individual and social levels of identity construction that are apparent in personally important autobiographical memory narratives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychology of life stories.

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest among theorists and researchers in autobiographical recollections, life stories, and narrative approaches to understanding human behavior and experience. An important development in this context is D. P. McAdams's life story model of identity (1985; see also records 1993-97296-000 and 1996-06098-001), which asserts that people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalized and evolving narratives of the self. The idea that identity is a life story resonates with a number of important themes in developmental, cognitive, personality, and cultural psychology. This article reviews and integrates recent theory and research on life stories as manifested in investigations of self-understanding, autobiographical memory, personality structure and change, and the complex relations between individual lives and cultural modernity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Narrative and ethnic identity exploration: A longitudinal account of emerging adults’ ethnicity-related experiences.

The purpose in this longitudinal study was to investigate further the link between ethnic identity processes and content through an examination of emerging adults’ narratives of ethnicity-related experiences. Seventy ethnically diverse college students completed an ethnic identity exploration index and told an ethnicity-related narrative on 2 occasions 18 months apart. Results indicated that (a) participants who increased in exploration over time were more likely to change their narrative theme than participants who decreased or remained stable in exploration and (b) these changes were more likely to be to stories of experience of prejudice or connection to culture. This study highlights the costs and benefits of ethnic identity and provides evidence for a linkage between ethnic identity process and content in emerging adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive parenting in adolescence and its relation to low point narration and identity status in emerging adulthood: A longitudinal analysis.

In this longitudinal study, we examined identity development using the life story model (McAdams, 2001), in addition to a traditional identity status approach, in order to explore the association between perceived parenting in adolescence and the subsequent quality of life story narration in emerging adulthood. Participants (N = 100) were given a battery of questionnaires at ages 17 and 26 years and were asked to narrate a story at age 26 about their most difficult life experience. Low point narratives were analyzed for evidence of concluding clarity, resolution, and affective tone, termed coherent positive resolution (Pals, 2006). Structural equation modeling showed that participants who experienced more positive parenting at age 17 narrated their low points with clearer evidence of coherent positive resolution at age 26. Coherent positive resolution of the low point was also related to concurrent measures of identity achievement and emotional adjustment at age 26. Discussion centers on the potential impact of positive parenting as a contributor to healthy low point narration and identity in emerging adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A social interactional model of bereavement narrative disclosure.

According to recent bereavement research, disclosing the narrative of one’s loss does not per se promote emotional recovery. At the same time, social, personality, and developmental research suggests that telling personal stories is an important means of building identity and relationships throughout adulthood. Drawing on this literature, this review illustrates how bereavement narrative disclosure may be instrumental in addressing psychosocial challenges associated with bereavement (e.g., relationship formation, identity reconstruction, and meaning making). Multiple individual and social factors may affect how successful bereavement narrative disclosure is these challenges. Applying a social interactional model of memory telling, this review examines the influence of the relationship of narrator and listener, their personality characteristics, the content and structure of the narrative, the type of loss, and the time since the loss in facilitating or disrupting the putative goals of bereavement narrative disclosure. The utility of this model for clinicians working with bereaved individuals is also explored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Late adolescents' self-defining memories about relationships.

This study examined late adolescents' self-defining memories about relationships. Participants were 88 European Americans (mean age=19 years) who reported 3 self-defining memories of their choosing and were selected for the study because they reported a memory about parents and/or peers. Memory, narratives were coded for themes of separation, closeness, and conflict and for 2 kinds of meaning: learning lessons and gaining insight. Parent memories emphasized separation more so than peer memories, which emphasized closeness. Within parent memories, however, separation and closeness were equally prevalent. Parent separation was exemplified by experiences of parental divorce, parent closeness by comforting a grieving parent, and peer closeness by episodes of first-time romance. Conflict was more prevalent in parent than peer memories and was associated with meaning-making. Findings are discussed in terms of the usefulness of self-defining memories for illuminating contexts of relationship development in late adolescence and for understanding the emergence of identity and the life story. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Narrative psychology and psychotherapy integration.

Bruner (1986) and Sarbin (1986) have argued that people make sense of living by actively constructing stories containing characters moving toward goals through time. Both content and structure in these narratives are understood as promoting either flexible, adaptive functioning or psychological distress. Theories of psychotherapy can also be seen as stories about human function and dysfunction that incorporate many of the same ideas about reality, human nature and change that are found in clients' personal narratives. This narrative perspective, then, suggests that the therapeutic alliance might be improved and an integrative use of different theories might be made by selecting therapeutic approaches and interventions based on the degree of similarity between the nature of the client's life story and the story of human functioning incorporated in the theory. A classification of theories, examples of classification of client stories and some issues of implementation of this integrative proposal are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stories of the young and the old: Personal continuity and narrative identity.

This study examined narrative identity in 2 groups of participants who were younger (ages ranging from late adolescence through young adulthood) and older (over the age of 65 years). Participants completed an extensive interview in which they reported three self-defining memories. Interviews were coded for several characteristics of autobiographical reasoning: self-event connections representing self-stability or self-change, event-event connections, reflective processing, and thematic coherence. Results showed that the older and younger groups were not different in terms of the frequencies of self-event connections or the levels of reflective processing. However, in comparison with the younger group, the older group had more thematic coherence and more stories representing stability, whereas the younger group had more stories representing change. Gender differences also emerged, suggesting that females may have an advantage in the development of narrative identity. Results are discussed in terms of the different ways to represent narrative identity at 2 ends of the life span. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The promise of multimedia stories for kindergarten children at risk.

This research focuses on the ability of book-based animated stories, when well designed and produced, to have positive effects on young viewers' narrative comprehension and language skills. Sixty 5-year-olds, learning Dutch as a 2nd language, were randomly assigned to 4 experimental and 2 control conditions. The children profited to some extent from repeated encounters with a storybook with static pictures but more from repeated encounters with the animated form of the story. Both story formats were presented on a computer screen; both included the same oral text spoken in the same voice but the animated story was supplemented with multimedia features (video, sounds, and music) dramatizing the events. Multimedia additions were especially effective for gaining knowledge of implied elements of stories that refer to goals or motives of main characters, and in expanding vocabulary and syntax. The added value of multimedia books was strengthened over sessions. In a group from families with low educational levels who were lagging in language and literacy skills, multimedia storybooks seem to provide a framework for understanding stories and remembering linguistic information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of a check-off system to improve middle school students' story compositions

This study examined the effects of a self-management procedure designed to teach three 13- to 14-year-old middle school boys with learning and behavior problems to improve the completeness (inclusion of identified story elements) and quality (organization and coherence) of their story compositions. The procedure was based on two strategies: teaching the students to plan stories composed in a narrative style, and teaching them to monitor the inclusion of elements from the plan with a check-off system. A multiple baseline design was used to assess the effectiveness of the procedure, and a combination of holistic and atomistic ratings was used to assess the completeness and quality of the students' written work. Results indicated that stories were more complete when students used a simple check-off system to plan and monitor their work. In addition, there was a moderate correlation between the atomistic and holistic measures used to assess stories, with the total number of words written correlating most strongly (r = .49) with the overall rating for story quality.     

The story of suffering. On the traces of narrative medicine

In recognising the importance of narratives of illness we conducted a study on the ability of a specific method to elicit the patient's story. A Five Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) interview was applied to 92 patients with a recent diagnosis of breast cancer. According to Mishler, a complete narrative has six elements: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, result and coda, with complicating action and evaluation as the essential parts. Of the 92 patients, 50 gave a narrative during the FMSS. One of the narratives is referred in detail. The article advocates giving renewed attention to patients' stories, because they bring the doctor closer to the patients' point of view. This is particularly important when dealing with chronic illness and crises.     

Explanation-based decision making: Effects of memory structure on judgment.

This article reports research that supports an explanation-based model of decision making applied to judicial decisions. In Experiment 1, recognition memory responses demonstrated that subjects spontaneously evaluated evidence in a legal judgment task by constructing an explanatory representation in the form of a narrative story. Furthermore, an item's membership in the story associated with the chosen or rejected verdict predicted subjects' ratings of its importance as evidence. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to evidence from criminal trials presented in various orders designed to manipulate the ease with which a particular explanatory summary of the evidence (story) could be constructed. The order manipulation shifted verdict choices in the direction of the more easily constructed story, implying that story structure causes decisions. In addition, the coherence of the explanatory story structure and the strength of alternative stories were major determinants of perceptions of strength of evidence and of confidence in the decision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Family Stories and the Life Course: Across Time and Generations.

In this review of "Family Stories and the Life Course: Across Time and Generations" (see record 2004-13618-000), the reviewer states that many psychologists will want to read this book from cover to cover because it is excellent. It will create excitement for developmental psychologists who are open to extending their perspectives on individual functioning to include more of a focus on whole family systems. It will also challenge family psychologists to deepen their understanding of how the functioning of each family member at different stages of the life span is related to interactions and meaning-making in the group. Clinical psychologists will glean new ideas about the accounts of family life they hear from their clients and the transformative power of having family members jointly engage in reconstructing problematic family stories. The range of topics and the overall quality of the research and theorizing are truly impressive. This book draws together in one volume conceptual development and recent research findings about family narratives. The reader will gain an understanding of how family stories and story telling are related to acquisition of language, regulation of affect, attachment processes and socialization of children, development of identity in adolescents, cognitive functioning in older persons, and interactions between children, parents, and grandparents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A narrative approach to ethnic identity in emerging adulthood: Bringing life to the identity status model.

This study used a narrative approach to understand how emerging adults experience ethnicity in their everyday lives and to link ethnic identity processes with the content of how ethnic identity is experienced. Participants were 191 ethnically diverse emerging adults who completed the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) and provided a written narrative about a time at which they became aware of their ethnicity. Participants' narratives differed significantly by ethnic group and by ethnic identity status membership, as indexed by the MEIM. The results underscore the value of adopting a narrative approach to understanding the content of ethnic identity and the links between content and ethnic identity development processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The robustness and temporal course of the story schema's influence on recall.

Three experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to remember simple stories they had read. The goal was to examine the power of the story schema, postulated in a contemporary story grammar, to influence subjects' level and organization of memory, particularly when they are presented with scrambled versions of stories. The results of Experiment 1 are consistent with previous findings, and we demonstrated the schema's influence on the level and organization of free recall. In Experiment 2 we demonstrated the strong influence of the schema on recall of details (measured by a cloze procedure), as well as recall for the story's gist (measured by a summary construction task). Finally, in Experiment 3 we demonstrated that the schema's influence on the organization of memory holds over time and serves to buttress the more abstract and general elements of the narrative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using personal and fictional documents to assess psychosocial development: A case study of Vera Brittain's generativity.

Adult diaries and novels written by the British feminist and pacifist V. Brittain (1893–1970) were content analyzed for Eriksonian themes of identity, intimacy, and generativity. Brittain's concerns with identity and intimacy decreased over time, while her generative concerns increased, suggesting that she expressed the issue of generativity vs. stagnation in her mid-life diaries and fiction. The large number of identity themes relative to both intimacy and generativity provokes speculations about Brittain's personality, the characteristics of writers, the influence of gender, the impact of society, and the possibility that the crisis of identity vs. role confusion involves the last major structural change in personality development. This archival case study is consistent with Erikson's notion of a sequence of concerns with psychosocial issues, although directions for theoretical revision and elaboration are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Doctor talk and diabetes: towards an analysis of the clinical construction of chronic illness

During the last two decades the illness narrative has emerged as a popular North American literary form. Through poignant stories, well-educated patients have recounted their struggle with disabling diseases as well as with the hospitals and health care bureaucracies from whom they seek service. However, much less has been written about the doctor's narrative construction of chronic diseases either in the process of learning medicine or through diagnosing, treating and counseling chronically ill patients. Indeed, following Kleinman's lead, the physician's narrative has been narrowly viewed as a discourse on the verifiable manifestations of pathophysiology. Drawing on contemporary theories of storytelling--including the conception of narrative as conversational interaction--the present paper argues that doctor narratives are equally complex if quite different than patient stories. Indeed, through an analysis of doctor talk centering on diabetes mellitus collected in several distinct venues--case presentations, narrative interviews and medical consultations--it is argued that physician stories not only employ very evocative tropes, but that these stories combine didactic, rhetorical and soterological elements in the telling. The research was conducted at two, urban family practice training sites in Chicago.