This summary includes the Delivery formats online Lecture, it's a recorded lecture. The lecture covered Article McAdams (2011)

LIFE STORIES  -- NARRATIVE IDENTITY

“Language doesn’t describe reality, but constructs it”

WHY FOCUS ON LIFE STORIES?

FUNCTIONAL APPROACH

• Functions of life stories (Susan Bluck): social, directive, identity

EXPRESSIVE WRITING

• Pennebaker & Beall (1986):
  • Experiment with psychology students, 4 conditons:
    • Results: Trauma combination group had least illness visits across time
      • Control: writing about trivial things
      • Trauma-fact: describing facts about traumatic experience(s)
      • Trauma-emotion: expressing emotions about traumatic experience(s)
      • Trauma-combination: describing facts and expressing emotions about traumatic experience(s)
• Meta-analyses:
  
  • Evidence of effects on physiological and psychological functioning
    
    • Expressing emotions in language results in meaning --> matters for your health

WHAT DO STORIES TELL?

LEVEL 1: A STORY ABOUT AN EVENT

• STORY PENTAD: the agent, the setting, the act/event, the meaning, the purpose
  • Depression -->  events less specific, more negative, less agentic stories

LEVEL 2: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REASONING

• Meaning: Does it tell you something about yourself, your relations to others, or your world view?
• Tendency to draw summary conclusions about the self from autobiographical episodes --> Identification/distancing
  
  • Depression --> More negative summary conclusions about the self

LEVEL 3: LIFE STORY COHERENCE

• MCADAMS: NARRATIVE IDENTITY
  • “Narrative identity is an internalized and evolving story of the self that provides a person’s life with some semblance of unity, purpose, and meaning. Complete with setting, scenes, characters, plots, and themes, narrative identity combines a person’s reconstruction of his or her personal past with an imagined future in order to provide a subjective historical account of one’s own development, an instrumental explanation of a person’s most important commitments in the realms of work and love, and a moral justification of who a person was, is, and will be.”
• Coherence:
  
  • Temporal coherence: linear, chronological order
  • Causal coherence: relations and explanations between events
  • Thematic coherence: recognizing and describing important themes
  • Biographical coherence: relating the story to cultural life course patterns

HOW DO LIFE STORIES DEVELOP ACROSS THE LIFESPAN?

• Development in social context:
  • 16-18 months: parents determine content and structure, children confirm or repeat
  • 2-years: children give additional pieces when asked by parents
  • 3-years: children mention new topics and new aspects of past experiences
  • 6-years: rather consistent story of a personal experience
  • 10-14 years: biographical phantasies
  • 17-25 years: fully coherent stories as expression of narrative identity
  • 25+ years: reading one’s life and adapting narrative identity
  • old age: life review to come to terms with death acceptance
• ROBYN FIVUSH: CHILDHOOD
  
  • Parents differ in ‘elaborativeness’ (the extent they focus on isolated facts and information versus background, context, emotions, and evaluations)
  • Scaffolding --> Parental style is consistent over time
• MCADAMS: ADULT LIFESPAN PERSPECTIVE --> “Once narrative identity enters the developmental scene, it remains a project to be worked on for much of the rest of the life course”
  
  • Reading one’s life and adapting narrative identity
  • Less specific, but more positive
  • Reminiscence bump:  tendency to have increased or enhanced recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood
  • Life review

NARRATIVES AND MENTAL HEALTH

• Narrative Intervention design:
  • Participant values: “Psychological safety: Being able to show and employ one's self without fear of negative consequences (Kahn 1990, p. 708)”
  • Professional expertise: “Compassion: ‘the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help’ (Goetz et al., 2010, p. 351)”