Identity and My Life Story in Psychology

Objective: The present work aimed to evaluate: (a) the psychometric properties of the Centrality of Event Scale in Italian primiparous and multiparous women; (b) individual differences in those demographic variables that influence change in women’s identity and the maternal role acquisition during pregnancy; (c) the association between the extent to which pregnancy has an impact on woman’s life story and identity and prenatal attachment; (c) how the centrality of the pregnancy event is related to the experience of PTSD during pregnancy. Background: Pregnancy is a crucial phase in women’s life that involves many changes for a woman’s role and identity. Methods 319 pregnant women were assessd during the third trimester of pregnancy. Results: Exploratory Factor Analyses confirmed a one-factor solution of the CES. Moreover, the perception of pregnancy as central in women’s lives is significantly related to prenatal attachment. Finally, the perception of pregnancy as central in women’s lives is positively correlated to PTSD symptoms. Conclusion: Our findings provide evidence on the validity of the scale with pregnant women samples, which may contribute for a better understanding of the impact of pregnancy on women’s identity and life story, as well as the underlying psychological challenges related to pregnancy.

PART 1. Time, Place, Story: Introductory Perspectives on Narrative and the Life Course 1. Narrative Engagement and Sexual Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Sexual Lives. Phillip L. Hammack & Bertram J. Cohler 2. History, Narrative, and Sexual Identity: Gay Liberation and Post-War Movements for Sexual Freedom in the United States. Benjamin Shepard Culture, Identity, Narrative: Context and Multiplicity in Sexual Lives 3. Stories from the Second World: Narratives of Sexual Identity in the Czech Republic across Three Generations of Men who have Sex with Men. Timothy McCajor Hall 4. Unity and Purpose at the Intersections of Racial/ethnic and Sexual Identities. Ilan H. Meyer & Suzanne C. Ouellette 5. Bisexuality in a House of Mirrors: Multiple Reflections, Multiple Identities. Paula C. Rodriguez Rust 6. Narrative Identity Construction of Black Youth for Social Change. Mollie V. Blackburn PART 3. Identities in Process: Stories of Risk and Relationships 7. Between Kansas and Oz: Drugs, Sex, and the Search for Gay Identity in the Fast Lane. Steven P. Kurtz 8. (My) Stories of Lesbian Friendship. Jacqueline S. Weinstock 9. Emergence of a Poz Sexual Culture: Accounting for Barebacking among Gay Men. Barry D. Adam 10. Connectedness, Communication, and Reciprocity in Lesbian Relationships: Implications for Women's Construction and Experience of PMS. Janette Perz & Jane M. Ussher 11. Postcards from the Edge: Narratives of Sex and Relationship Breakdown among Gay Men. Damien Ridge & Rebecca Wright Making Gay and Lesbian Identities: Development, Generativity, and the Life Course 12. In the Beginning: American Boyhood and the Life Stories of Gay Men. Bertram J. Cohler 13. The Role of the Internet in the Sexual Identity Development of Gay and Bisexual Male Adolescents. Gary W. Harper, Douglas Bruce, Pedro Serrano, & Omar B. Jamil 14. Focus on the Family: The Psychosocial Context of Gay Men Choosing Fatherhood. David deBoer 15. Midlife Lesbian Lifeworlds: Narrative Theory and Sexual Identity. Mary Read 16. The Good (Gay) Life: The Search for Signs of Maturity in the Narratives of Gay Adults. Laura A. King, Chad M. Burton, & Aaron C. Geise 17. Generativity and Time in Gay Men's Life Stories. Andrew J. Hostetler 18. From Same-Sex Desire to Homosexual Identity: History, Biography, and the Production of the Sexual Self in Lesbian and Gay Elders' Narratives. Dana Rosenfeld Concluding Perspective 19. Lives,Times, and Narrative Engagement. Bertram J. Cohler & Phillip L. Hammack

People telling stories of national identity, land and spirituality contribute to the local formation of the nation. I explore this view of nationhood in Aotearoa/New Zealand from Māori and Pākehā perspectives. Theorising this exploration, I form my own national identity concept for guiding analysis, that of locally narrated roots. Locally narrated roots is, essentially, a way of looking at national identity through the everyday narration of land, spirituality and history/ancestry by individuals. Supporting the production of this term is Smith’s (2003) theory of revised ethnosymbolism, which links religion, nationalism, land and history/ancestry, and Thompson’s (2001) grounded, everyday approach summed up as local production of national identity. Research methods draw upon Thompson’s people-focussed approach in conjunction with a narrative approach inspired by life story and Kaupapa Māori Research practices, which informed the conducting of twelve semi-structured interviews. From these interviews, six Māori and six Pākehā stories of history, ancestry, spirituality, land and identity were generated. These narratives revealed that colonial settler society, romanticism and whakapapa (genealogy) are central to this research and vital for further exploration on national identity. I close with the suggestion that participants’ stories enact a process of locally authenticating one’s national identity. I also suggest this local authentication is a secular spirituality, an idea that combines both patent secularism and spirituality, and is expressed through land, history and ancestry in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Recent investigations propose that cognitive characteristics of autobiographical memory significantly interact with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A traumatic event becoming more or less central in a person’s identity and life story might influence development of the disorder. Studies show high correlations between event centrality (EC) and PTSD. Participated in this study 68 treatment-seeking individuals referred to a specialized service for suspected trauma-related disorder: 39 matched criteria for PTSD and 29 were exposed to trauma without PTSD. Our aims were to explore how the groups differ regarding EC, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic cognitions, PTSD symptom severity, and peritraumatic dissociative experience; and how distinctively EC interacts with the measures in each group. The PTSD group had higher scores in all variables but dissociation. EC correlated with overall PTSD symptoms only in the PTSD group and with dissociation only in the no-PTSD group. Findings support a model emphasizing the role of memory processes in PTSD. People exposed to trauma who developed PTSD had the memory of the traumatic experience more intensively governing their sense of self and thus eliciting more negative cognitive reactions. As EC facilitates recollection of the traumatic event, it could also mediate a semantization process that reinforces and increases posttraumatic symptoms.

Two studies examined the connection between motivation for weight loss and autobiographical memory by comparing characteristics of autobiographical memories between dieters and non-dieters. Study 1 involved 29 normal/overweight dieters and 48 non-dieters, and Study 2 involved 18 obese dieters and 18 normal weight non-dieters. Memories recalled in response to dieting-related cue words were rated as more central to the person's identity and life story and contained more body- or weight-related elements for the dieters than the non-dieters. No differences between dieters and non-dieters were found on memories recalled in response to neutral cue words. The findings are discussed in relation to the notions of the working self (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and current concerns (Klinger, 1978).

Howard Goldstein (1922-2000) was a renowned social work educator and author. He was also my teacher. This article is a re-membering “conversation” between Howard and me, based on papers I wrote in his classes in 1972-73 and his written responses to them. In narrative therapy, remembering conversations acknowledge and privilege contributions of significant people to a person's preferred identity and life story. In this article I celebrate Howard's rich and continuing contributions to my life as a social worker and educator and suggest that these contributions remain vitally relevant to social work practice today.

A diagnosis of ovarian cancer has an impact on many areas of a woman's life which define her identity and life story. Women are forced to reconsider the future ‘scenes’ of their life scripts as they deal with the loss of fertility, a challenge to plans and existential threat. This paper considers this experience within the theoretical framework of the Self-Memory System.Alongside this theory, the author shares her use of dramatherapy tools applied to weekend residential courses run across the UK on four occasions to support women affected by ovarian cancer.

ABSTRACTAlthough positive events occur frequently in people's lives, autobiographical memory for happy events has received only marginal attention within the psychology literature. This study followed a between-subjects design to examine the similarities and differences between eudaimonic and hedonic happy memories. Two groups of undergraduates provided narratives of personally experienced eudaimonic and hedonic events, respectively. They also completed questionnaires assessing the memory characteristics of recalled events and the centrality of such events for the individual's identity and life story. In addition, the participants' levels of well-being were assessed. The content analysis of narratives revealed that eudaimonic memories mostly referred to transitional life events; by contrast, the most reported hedonic memories referred to close relationship experiences. Eudaimonic and hedonic recollections were further compared on quantitative measures of memory characteristics, statistically controlling for retention interval and event centrality. Results showed that eudaimonic memories involved more intense feelings of pride and were socially shared more frequently than hedonic memories. However, the two memory types were similar with respect to a number of features (e.g., sensory details). It is argued that participants remembering eudaimonic events were more influenced by cultural life scripts. Implications of the findings for the measurement of psychological well-being are also discussed.

The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course. Phillip Hammack and Bertram Cohler (Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. 474 pp. ISBN 9780195326789. $49.95 (Cloth). The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course, by editors Phillip Hammack and Bertram Cohler, explores the role of sociocultural and political contexts embedded in various historical periods and how these affect the life trajectories of gay and lesbian individuals and families. Further, the volume offers several chapters that examine how context informs the ways in which gays and lesbians have and are creating, shaping, and reshaping the stories of their sexual identities, illuminating the meaning behind them in an eloquent and in many instances emotionally intimate way. The editors open the volume with their conceptualization of the co-constructional processes of sexual identity development, drawing from multiple disciplines including history, psychology, sociology, and queer studies. To further conceptually ground the volume they are among the first (cf. Savin-Williams, 2005) to move away from more static early models of sexual identity development (e.g., Cass, 1979) by merging narrative and life-course perspectives. The resulting theoretical framework highlights the fluid and dynamic sexual identities of gays and lesbians and the influential role of context in their development over the life course. The editors, and many of the chapter authors, assert that the meaning of one's sexual identity is more than simply being gay or lesbian, alternative to the idea of a master narrative. The meaning of gay or lesbian varies by person and context, although some elements can be shared, especially within a generation that shares an experience, thereby creating a narrative generation. For example, those gay men of dating age during the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s are a recognized generation defined by a specific historical event. As a result of this shared experience, they share a similar discourse about dating in the age of AIDS. However, this is not to suggest that everyone shares the same discourse. Another example includes an individual's coming out story that is situated in the era of the emergence of AIDS. In fact, several chapters examine new or existing data and literature by contextualizing the life stories of gays and lesbians using a generation narrative in a way that could not be more timely. The current sociocultural and political context affecting the lives of gay and lesbian individuals, couples, and families in the United States and abroad differs vastly between and within countries and is highlighted in several chapters throughout the volume. In the United States alone, some basic rights (e.g., protections from discrimination in housing and the work place) are afforded to gay and lesbian individuals in some states, whereas in others it remains legal to deny housing to someone because of their perceived sexual identity. Similarly, in some states gay and lesbian couples who wish to marry are allowed the same state-level rights and privileges of marriage as heterosexual couples, whereas in other states they can register to receive some marital-like rights via domestic partnerships statutes. Still, in most states no rights or privileges are afforded these couples. Further, in most states and to a small extent at the federal level, the rights, privileges, and constraints for these individuals and families are contested and changing rapidly (for better or worse; e.g., the repeal of Proposition 8 in California). In fact, it has become commonplace to encounter some form of media (e.g., Internet) that discusses the latest developments in gay and lesbian rights, and it is widely accepted that discrimination continues to pervade the fabric of the American tapestry. Certainly, each decade or historical period in American history has differentially influenced the constraints and access to myriad rights, privileges, and safe communities for gay and lesbians. …

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine why the uptake of free milk in a particular nursery class was low, to explore the meanings children attribute to drinks given to them in school and those brought from home, and make suggestions as to what might be done to improve children's intake of free school milk.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on a case study of a nursery class attached to a primary school in West London. A total of 24 morning sessions were observed, comprising of 72 snack times. In addition, interviews were carried out with parents and early years' practitioners i.e. teachers and nursery nurses. Children's views were elicited through use of narrative observations and an activity using their drinks' cartons.FindingsThis study found that these young children linked drinks brought in from home to having choices whereas drinking school milk was associated with having little or no choice. Unlike school milk, drinks from home were linked to stories of personal identity and family life. The children seemed to exert pressure on their parents to provide them with a drink from home and appeared to be attracted to drinks that included representations of characters from popular culture as well as particular brands.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is based on one case study, therefore issues raised may not be generalisable to all nursery settings.Practical implicationsThis paper encourages early years' practitioners to look in detail at how they organize snack times and the way that this might contribute to negative perceptions of healthy foods/drinks. It offers practical suggestions around how the uptake of milk could be improved in a nursery setting, emphasizing the need for the active involvement of the children. In addition, the study highlights the importance of informal as well as formal discussions with parents about food and drinks. The study recommends that improvements need to be made to early years' practitioners' initial and subsequent training in this area, given the significant role they play in health promotion.Originality/valueThe value of this paper lies in the way it elicits the active participation of young children in the research as well as the focus on the minutiae of nursery practice and its implications for promoting healthy eating/drinking.

In Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, Howard Gardner (1995) wrote: "Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate" (p. 9). Leaders express stories in the way they live their own lives, and they aim to evoke stories in the lives of those they lead. "The artful creation and articulation of stories constitutes a fundamental part of the leadership vocation," Gardner claimed. Further, "it is stories of identity—narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed—that constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader's literary arsenal" (Gardner, 1995, p. 43).KeywordsAutobiographical MemoryLife StoryPersonal StoryNarrative IdentityAmerican ConservativeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This article addresses drug users’ identity construction, and invites counsellors, psychotherapists, researchers and others who work with drug misusers to notice how cultural and societal discourses can shape drug misusers’ stories, and the positions from which helpers listen and respond to them. By representing and analysing parts of two life stories, gathered as part of a wider narrative inquiry, this article draws attention to the learning embedded in a person's story about how traumatic life experiences shaped their drug misuser identity during adolescence and young adulthood. It suggests that by focusing on identity construction and reconstruction we can enable drug users to identify the discourses that have shaped their identities and thereby open up spaces for new and more hopeful stories of identity to emerge.

The purpose of the article is to identify the distinctive features of the narrative code of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. The research methods include historical and literary methods, receptive and comparative methods, and close reading techniques. The study draws on narratological frameworks developed by R. Barthes, G. Genette, W. Schmid. It has been established that the complex narrative structure of the novel is evident even at the lev- el of its framing apparatus: the work is intertwined with an essay originally conceived as a preface rather than as a separate, independent text. Trying to internally distance himself from the depicted events that took place more than 100 years ago, the writer creates the image of an impartial fixer of information that he gets from direct observers, which allows us to speak of multiple narrators. The author’s distancing from the events is achieved through two techniques common in 19th-century European literature: the “text within a text” approach and the technique of mystification. The essay is presented from the perspective of the narrator of the framing story – the primary diegetic / homodiegetic narrator – who is expressed gram- matically in the first-person singular. The woman’s life story functions as a text within a text, attributed to the secondary narrator (the narrator of the internal story), who is a character in the framing narrative but serves as a primary non-diegetic / extradiegetic narrator in the main narrative, positioned outside the fic- tional world and recounting events from a third-person perspective. It is noted that, in establishing a relia- ble narrator, the primary diegetic / homodiegetic narrator assigns the primary non-diegetic / extradieget- ic narrator a name, biographical details, and even official documents. By emphasizing his role as the editor of an authentic story, the primary diegetic narrator acknowledges having invented the characters’ motives and emotions, indicating a blending of perspectives and leaving it to the reader to determine whose view- point is being presented. The events in Hawthorne’s novel are presented from the perspective of a primary non-diegetic / extradiegetic narrator, while the first-person plural appears in the text through various con- structions. Consequently, the form “we” can encompass the author as well as narrators of all types repre- sented in the text. It is highlighted that the main character, Hester Prynne, possesses a remarkable personality and un- intentionally integrates into a world foreign to her with new principles unfamiliar to that society. Because she bears a child out of wedlock, she finds herself socially isolated. In developing the theme of the towns- folk’s psychological and emotional torment of Hester, motifs of her uncanny ability to perceive the sin of others, the ostensible piety, and hidden sinfulness of the entire community – including children – are em- – including children – are em- including children – are em- – are em- are em- ployed. The theme of social isolation of mother and child is linked to the motif of the circle, symbolizing en- trapment and hopelessness. Hawthorne’s fictional portrayal underscores that the social isolation of moth- er and child enabled the emergence of individuals with a new value system within a fanatically religious community. The motif of sin is further intertwined with that of atonement. The novel emphasizes the theme of the relativity of the meaning behind the scarlet letter. If we con- sider that “A” is the first letter of the alphabet, Hester Prynne’s character gains symbolic significance as the woman from whom the story of American identity begins. On the other hand, the word English “letter” can also mean “message,” so combined with the semantics of “scarlet,” the title The Scarlet Letter may be in- terpreted as “The Precious Message,” with the novel itself serving as a message to both women and men settling in a new country. In Hawthorne’s interpretation of the theme of sin’s atonement, the portrayal of the illegitimate child becomes particularly significant. Through the behavior of the girl and her unique interactions with her mother, the novel consistently shows that, even at a young age, the heroine displayed individuality and was capable of standing up to a harsh crowd. It is emphasized that Hester Prynne rejects the Old Testament notion that children should bear the consequences of their parents’ actions. She refrains from imposing an ascetic lifestyle on her daughter, allows her the joys of childhood play, and lets her follow her own impuls- es. In building the images of Prynne as mother and child, the narrator compares the heroine to Divine Ma- ternity, referencing the prophet Nathan, David, and Bathsheba. Subtle references to two fi gures born out- Subtle references to two fi gures born out- Subtle references to two figures born out- side of marriage yet symbolic for humanity suggestively evoke the idea that young Pearl is an apostle of a new, future world free from dogma. In this light, the episode where the girl dances on the gravestone of one of the most respected settlers becomes significant. Her innocent playfulness is perceived as a symbolic rejection or devaluation of everything that the former Europeans are trying to forcibly implant in American society – a past that must fade away to make room for something new. The impersonal note that the law was broken with the girl’s birth, combined with her ultimately fortunate fate, suggests that through their severe judgment, the colonists unknowingly altered the course of life, paving the way for the development of new principles of social existence. Puritan society in The Scarlet Letter is, in part, embodied by the elderly scholar Roger Chillingworth / Prynne, who could be described in modern terms as an abuser. Chillingworth’s character aligns with the Byronic hero type, popular at the time the novel was written. On one hand, he is a knowledgeable scien- tist with a broad perspective and a free-thinking mind; on the other, he is somber and resentful toward a world in which he believes he is unloved due to his physical deformity. His pursuit of a rival begins as a psy- chological puzzle and eventually turns into a cruel game. Scattered throughout the text are details pointing toward the archetypal image of Faust and the recurring motif of the devil in the novel. The character of Ar- The character of Ar- The character of Ar- thur Dimmesdale is perhaps the most complex in The Scarlet Letter. The novel’s depiction of events as mystical and characters as extraordinary, endowed with irration- al abilities and even demonic qualities, directs us toward the aesthetics of Romanticism, which dominated literature at that time. Considering the thematic elements of The Scarlet Letter, it can be interpreted as an effortless didactic story about new feminine values on the American continent. At the same time, the work can be classified as both a romance and a psychological novel that artistically examines how guilt influenc- es a person’s behavior, emotions, and worldview. The use of mystification and the play of authorial masks invite the reader to decide whether such a woman truly existed or if she was fictional.

Researchers and practitioners in psychology and the social sciences are increasingly recognizing the value of narrative and life story approaches to understanding lived experience (McAdams & Pals, ...

This qualitative, feminist study is focused on lesbians' experiences growing up in multiproblem families, surviving aftereffects of trauma, and struggling with alcohol problems. A multi-racial sample of 20 lesbians narrated life stories in a series of three in-depth interviews. The research report opens with one woman's narrative about surviving childhood sexual abuse and continues with explication of how differences and similarities within and between accounts pivot on the issues of sexual orientation, gender, and race. Results suggest that early in their lives, overwhelming violence and intrusive expectations were imposed, negating a clarity of experience about their authenticity. No participant expressed a belief that her sexual orientation was a result of childhood sexual abuse. The societal presumption of sexual abuse as an etiological factor in determining lesbian sexual orientation, nevertheless, was pivotal for these survivors because they had to constantly protect themselves from others' judgements about whether they were “real lesbians.” They described a multi-faceted, ingenious strategy, gender-blurring, that helped them garner a place of some value in the family and stave off some of the violence, but this protective stance made them question whether they were “real women.” Women also indicated that they grew up in families empty of cultural affiliation. Instead of knowledge and pride about connection with community, they experienced a gaping void about racial identification, ethnicity, parentage, and personal history. All in all, they survived a series of social identity exclusions. Conclusions call into question the usefulness and adequacy of theories about static psychological and social identities and suggest the importance of specific, localized analyses that explore narrative selves.