Coherent Life Story Research Articles

Narrative identity in addictive disorders: a conceptual review.

Narrative identity allows individuals to integrate their personal experiences into a coherent and meaningful life story. Addictive disorders appear to be associated with a disturbed sense of self, reflected in problematic and disorganized self-narratives. In recent literature, a growing body of research has highlighted how narrative approaches can make a dual contribution to the understanding of addiction: on the one hand, by revealing crucial aspects of self structure, and, on the other, by supporting the idea that addiction is a disorder related to unintegrated self-states in which dissociative phenomena and the resulting sense of 'loss of self' are maladaptive strategies for coping with distress. This conceptual review identified the main measures of narrative identity, i.e., narrative coherence and complexity, agency, and emotions, and critically examines 9 quantitative and qualitative studies (out of 18 identified in literature), that have investigated the narrative dimension in people with an addictive disorder in order to provide a synthesis of the relationship between self, narrative and addiction. These studies revealed a difficulty in the organization of narrative identity of people with an addictive disorder, which is reflected in less coherent and less complex autobiographical narratives, in a prevalence of passivity and negative emotions, and in a widespread presence of themes related to a lack of self-efficacy. This review points out important conceptual, methodological and clinical implications encouraging further investigation of narrative dimension in addiction.

Evidence for a metacognitive awareness of autobiographical memory organisation

Models of autobiographical memory (AM) recall posit some form of control process, but the extent to which we can reflect on this form of retrieval is under-researched. Here we propose a method for measuring such metacognitive awareness in AM. Since the verification of personal facts is difficult, we based our design on AM organisation. AMs are proposed to be organised into a coherent life story, that is, a subjective chronology reflecting the goals of the individual over time. We investigated the metacognitive awareness of this coherence. Eighty-three participants generated AMs and made two judgements of order for pairs of memories and gave a confidence rating. We found that participants were indeed able to distinguish pairs of memories that were coherent with their life story chronology from pairs which were not. We also found a significant effect of response time and task difficulty on confidence, suggesting that judgement of order fluency was determinant for metacognitive evaluation. This suggests common properties between metacognitive abilities related to autobiographical memory and those related to other forms of memory.

The mediating role of self-continuity on the link between childhood adversity and loneliness in later life.

Many factors may influence adaptation to critical life events such as divorce and bereavement in the second half of life, including having faced childhood adversity. However, pathways to reduced adaptation success are poorly understood. Self-continuity, an identity mechanism that incorporates life changes into a coherent life story, may contribute to better adaptation to adult critical life events, such as feeling less socially and emotionally lonely. We investigated the mediating role of self-continuity channeling the effects of childhood adversity on later life adaptation outcomes among individuals who had experienced divorce or bereavement. Data were derived from the longitudinal LIVES Intimate Partner Loss Study conducted in Switzerland from 2012 to 2016. The sample consisted of individuals who had experienced divorce (n = 416, Mage = 57.35) or bereavement (n = 339, Mage = 71.36) in later life, and a continuously married control group (n = 925, Mage = 67.04). Multilevel moderated mediations were used. Self-continuity mediated the effect of childhood adversity on emotional loneliness for all marital groups, but to a greater extent among divorcees. Self-continuity also mediated the effect of childhood adversity on social loneliness; however, this effect did not differ by marital group. In conclusion, childhood adversity was associated to greater loneliness in later life through self-continuity. Divorcees were the most impacted group regarding emotional loneliness, as they experienced lower levels of self-continuity. Interventions that aim to reinforce self-continuity may help overcome social and emotional loneliness, especially for individuals who have experienced the loss of their partner through divorce.

To mention or not to mention? The inclusion of self-reported most traumatic and most positive memories in the life story

ABSTRACT Many theories on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) make assumptions on the relationship between PTSD and centrality of traumas to the life story and identity. Although the Centrality of Event Scale (CES) is a popular measure of centrality of personally experienced events to the life story, no studies have examined whether self-rated “central” events are mentioned, when individuals recount their lives. It is also unknown if mentioning specific event types in the life story is related to psychological health or life story coherence. We asked 386 adults to write their life stories, nominate their most traumatic and positive events, rate these events on the CES, and complete measures of PTSD and depression. Two-thirds of the sample mentioned at least one event, with the positive event being mentioned twice as often as the trauma. Mentioned events were more central than non-mentioned events. Participants who mentioned their trauma scored higher on symptoms of PTSD and depression than participants who only mentioned their positive event, but did not write less coherent life stories. Further, death- and illness-related traumas were mentioned more often than accidents and disasters. Findings are discussed in relation to theories on trauma memory in PTSD.

The development of past and future life stories in adolescence: Overall emotional tone, coherence and life script events.

Research has shown that identity in adolescence takes the shape of a coherent life story that integrates the past with the present self and provides meaning and purpose in the person's life. One stable feature of narrative identity identified in adults is emotional tone. Here, the development of emotional tone in life stories was investigated across childhood and adolescence. A total of 142 adolescents aged 10 to 14years wrote about their past weekend, their past and future life stories and generated a cultural life script. Across age groups, adolescents told past life stories that were overall mixed (both positive and negative) or moderately positive in emotional tone, and future life stories that were positive or highly positive. In relation to life story development, we replicated findings on age-related development of life story coherence in both past and future life stories in 10-14-year-olds. Lastly, the study highlights the link between life story coherence and cultural life script abilities. Cultural life script typicality was linked to life story coherence for both past and future life stories and across all age groups, and a majority of events mentioned in future life stories overlapped with cultural life script events.

Chasing Dreams, Finding Nightmares: Exploring the Creative Limits of the Music Career

Chasing Dreams, Finding Nightmares: Exploring the Creative Limits of the Music Career

“Sowing the Story”: Narrative Identity and Emerging Adult Formation

Looking at the challenges of emerging adult spiritual formation, it appears that faith is often disconnected from the process of identity formation taking place at this time of life. In order to foster spiritual formation, Christian educators can benefit from the insights of those writing about emerging adult “narrative identity,” the weaving together of past, present, and future experiences into a coherent life story. This article details some of the key insights of these theorists and articulates the need for emerging adults to form their own narrative identities with reference to the larger biblical story. It then offers a framework for how the biblical story can be “sown” in their lives through ritual, rhetoric, roles, and relationships.

Narrative Identity Development and Desistance from Illegal Behavior among Substance-Using Female Offenders: Implications for Narrative Therapy and Creating Opportunity

According to narrative identity theory, to desist from breaking the law, offenders must fashion a prosocial identity through a process of redemption by “making good” of past negative events. To improve understanding of women offenders’ redemption, analyses were conducted of the life stories and the identity change those stories revealed for 118 U.S. women with histories of multiple criminal convictions. Women most often described redemption from illegal activity and substance misuse, distress and trauma, and the challenges of giving birth and parenting. They rarely described redemption in educational and employment settings. The numbers and types of accounts of redemption did not explain desistance. However, qualitative analyses showed important differences in the redemption accounts of women who did and did not desist. Persisters’ stories of redemption tended to lack coherence and revealed tendencies to minimize both the negative effects of illegal behavior and the connection of illegal behavior to identities. Desisters’ accounts emphasized women’s strong motivations to change and their efforts to distance their current from their prior selves, steer internal change, and identify valuable prosocial qualities in themselves. Promising treatment interventions include support for women’s development of coherent life stories and autonomy support to increase motivation to change. Findings also suggest the need for policy change to increase both employment opportunities for women offenders and programs that provide employment and education that promote prosocial identity development.

Life Narratives Are More Other-Centered, More Negative, and Less Coherent in Turkey Than in Germany: Comparing Provincial-Turkish, Metropolitan-Turkish, Turkish-German, and Native German Educated Young Adults.

An individualized and coherent life story has been described as the form of identity that is required by highly mobile individualistic Western societies, whereas more family-oriented, traditional societies require more role-based, synchronic identities. Therefore in individualistic cultures entire life narratives can be expected to be more coherent and to contain more autobiographical arguments that contribute to life narrative coherence. This cultural group difference is expected to be mediated by individuals’ conformity to their respective cultural normative concept of biography, such that more conformity leads to less life narrative coherence and fewer autobiographical arguments. We tested these expectations by eliciting entire life narratives and cultural life scripts from four different cultural groups of students of technical universities: from provincial Karabük and from metropolitan Istanbul in Turkey, as well as from students with a Turkish migrant and with a native German background from urban Frankfurt am Main, Germany (N = 96). Expectations were confirmed for global life narrative coherence and autobiographical arguments with self-event connections. Conformity with a normative concept of biography indeed partially mediated cultural influences on life narrative coherence. Life narratives from Turkey also contained more family-related events and, unexpectedly, were more negative. Thus creating a coherent life narrative is more typical for cultures that require autonomous, individualized selves rather than for cultures requiring more related selves, reflecting the life story’s suitability for expressing individualized identities and its lesser suitability for expressing interdependent identities.

The Creative Process, Memoir, And Redemption

Stories live to be told to others, Dan McAdams (2008) writes:
 Life stories therefore are continually made and remade in social relationships and in the overall social context provided by culture. As psychosocial constructions, life stories reflect the values, norms, and power differentials inherent in societies, wherein they have their constitutive meanings. The construction of coherent life stories is an especially challenging problem for adults living in contemporary modern (and postmodern) societies, wherein selves are viewed as reflexive projects imbued with complexity and depth, ever changing yet demanding a coherent framing.
 This paper considers the memoir as a kind of life story, to be explored through selected memoirists, researchers, and scholars by focusing on the relationship between identity construction, memory, history, and imagination. Narrative structure, as well as the compelling experiences and ideas detailed in memoirs, will be analyzed to arrive at a better understanding of issues related to the creative process.

Self-Event Connections in Life Stories, Self-Concept Clarity, and Dissociation: Examining Their Relations with Symptoms of Psychopathology

Constructing a coherent life story through the formation of self-event connections may help maintain unity in the self. We examined how positive and negative self-event connections were related to symptoms of psychopathology when controlling for two other measures of self-unity: self-concept clarity and dissociation. While most studies of life stories use content coding, we used a self-report method and hence provide a rationale for this method. One hundred five young adults identified life story chapters and rated them on self-event connections, including questions of positive or negative self-change and self-stability connections. They also completed scales measuring self-concept clarity, dissociation, and symptoms. Higher ratings of positive and lower ratings of negative self-event connections in life stories were related to fewer symptoms of psychopathology. Positive self-change was related to fewer symptoms when controlling for self-concept clarity and dissociation. The results suggest that positive and negative self-event connections are differentially related to symptoms of psychopathology. In addition, the results indicate that self-report measures of life stories may be a useful supplement to coding of narratives.

The lived experience of preparing for earthquakes in households: a phenomenological psychological study

This phenomenological study aimed to explore the lived experiences of households after the installation of seismic hazard mitigation measures. Unlike studies aimed at identifying the causal mechanisms behind household behavior, the present study focused on the subjective meaning of these experiences. A total of 17 households that had adopted seismic retrofitting were interviewed; data from six of these households were purposefully selected and analyzed in detail using Giorgi’s phenomenological psychological method. The data were reduced to a single structure according to which the installation of the seismic hazard mitigation measure was considered a dilemma related to perceptions of vulnerability versus the awkwardness of getting started, which developed into another irreconcilable dilemma related to feeling safer versus an awareness of absolute safety. In this process, a sense of life coherence was established, which enabled the participants to accept the irreconcilability. On the basis of these findings, this study proposes a new approach of promoting earthquake preparedness, in which the central point is practitioners assisting households to create their own coherent life stories to deal with these dilemmas. It sheds light on the importance of how practitioners listen to households, rather than of how practitioners inform households.

Connecting the dots from a distance: Does mentally traveling through space and time increase searching for life’s meaning?

As humans, we have the ability to travel beyond the present moment by considering past and future times as well as locations that are distant from oneself. An interesting possibility is that such mental travel to far-away times and places (vs. focusing on times and places closer to the present) may increase people’s desire to search for their lives’ meaning. Since searching for meaning involves the integration of separate life events into a coherent life story, mentally traveling farther away from the present may make people aware that their life stories include more than what is happening at this very minute. Such awareness, then, may increase their desire to ‘connect the dots’ between their life events by searching for some underlying meaning. Three experiments (N = 838) tested this prediction and found that greater (vs. lower) mental travel through space or time increased the search for life’s meaning.

Quand la cohérence narrative fait défaut : analyse de récits autobiographiques dans la schizophrénie

ObjectivesLife narratives of patients with schizophrenia offer unique material to explore patients’ subjective experience related to their illness, in particular the alteration of self observed in schizophrenia. Material and methodsWe used two protocols to collect life narratives of patients with schizophrenia and control subjects. A validated coding method to analyze life narratives enabled us to distinguish three kinds of life story coherence: temporal, causal-motivational and thematic. ResultsThe temporal coherence of narratives is mildly impaired in patients, in particular when narratives are collected using a more structured method. However, causal-motivational and thematic coherence are severely impaired: patients have difficulties explaining how events have modeled their identity, and integrating different events along thematic lines. Impairment of global causal-motivational and thematic coherence was significantly correlated with patients’ executive dysfunction, suggesting that cognitive impairment observed in patients could affect their ability to construct a coherent narrative of their life. ConclusionThis study provides new understanding of the cognitive deficits underlying self-disorders in patients with schizophrenia. Clinical perspectives ensuing from these results and aiming at improving narrative coherence in schizophrenia are discussed.

Multiple Cultures, Multiple Selves, and Analytic Influence: A Response to Goldin’s “The Storied Self”

Using a dynamic systems contextual model, I expand Daniel Goldin’s ideas about narrative and the “storied self.” I identify two issues that are key to the development of a coherent life story: first, the identification and integration of the multiple psychic self-states and external cultures with which and in which people live, and second, the meeting and melding of important minds in the person’s environment.

Characterizing lifespan development of three aspects of coherence in life narratives: a cohort-sequential study.

The ability to narrate stories and a synchronic self-concept develop in the pre- and primary school years. Life story theory proposes that both developments extend to an even later developmental stage, that is, to adolescents' acquisition of a coherent life story. Cross-sectional evidence supports the emergence of a life story in adolescence, but is mixed in terms of later life span development. The present study examines longitudinally the development of global coherence in life narratives across almost the entire life span. Starting in 2003, a total of 172 participants narrated their lives over the course of 8 years (aged 16, 20, 24, 28, 44, and 69 when last tested) resulting in up to 4 life narratives per person. Three aspects of global life narrative coherence--temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence--were measured with global ratings and predicted by their respective textual indicators. Children lacked most aspects of global coherence. Almost all indicators of temporal and causal-motivational coherence increased substantially across adolescence up to early adulthood, as did thematic coherence, which continued to develop throughout middle adulthood.

The future is bright and predictable: The development of prospective life stories across childhood and adolescence.

When do children develop the ability to imagine their future lives in terms of a coherent prospective life story? We investigated whether this ability develops in parallel with the ability to construct a life story for the past and narratives about single autobiographical events in the past and future. Four groups of school children aged 9 to 15 years imagined their future lives and produced past life stories, as well as a cultural life script (i.e., culturally shared assumptions as to the order and timing of important life events). They also produced narratives about single autobiographical events to take place in the near future or recent past. Past and prospective life story coherences developed in parallel across ages, that is, older children told more coherent life stories than younger children, irrespective of temporal direction. However, children produced more coherent stories about single events in the past than in the future. Across age groups, prospective life stories were shorter, contained more life script events and were more positive than past life stories. Life script normativity increased with age and predicted the coherence of prospective, but not of past, life stories. The findings indicate that the ability to tell coherent life stories for the past and future develops in parallel and relies on similar processes. Life script abilities might be a major factor in the development of past and prospective life story coherences but not for the development of single event story coherences.

Migrációs történetek, döntések és narratív identitás. A tanulmányi célú migrációról – másként

A tanulmányi célú migráció értelmezésemben transznacionális migráció, míg az e folyamatban résztvevő migránsok a transznacionális migránsok ideáltípusához közelítenek. A tanulmányi célú migrációt nem egyirányú és egyszeri elmozdulásként, hanem időben elhúzódó, nyitott kimenetelű folyamatként értelmezhetjük. Bármeddig húzódnak is el a tanulmányok, a migránsoknak előbb vagy utóbb döntést kell hozniuk a végleges (vagy annak tervezett) letelepedésről, arról, hogy életüket hol képzelik el. Írásomban azt mutatom be, hogy a magyarországi továbbtanulásról, illetve az itt maradásról vagy a hazatelepedésről szóló történetek milyen jellegzetes narratívákba ágyazódva jelennek meg a vajdasági magyar fiatalok elbeszéléseiben. A családorientált, a kisebbségi magyar identitás köré szerveződő, valamint az orientalista diskurzushoz kapcsolódó narratívák elemzésének kapcsán a migrációról szóló történetek, a migrációs döntések és a narratív identitás összefüggéseit igyekszem feltárni.

Imagination, Computation, and Self-Expression: Situated Character and Avatar Mediated Identity

The ability to construct imaginative, computational self-representations such as characters in games and avatars in virtual worlds and social media can impact people’s self-perception in the real world and provide proxies for people to engage in communities as players, learners, and doers. It is clear, however, that some users view characters and avatars instrumentally to accomplish virtual tasks, whereas others see them as virtual selves for playful identity construction and performance. Open questions about design of character/avatar construction tools include better understanding the trade-offs between accommodating representation of aspects of users real selves vs. enabling extraordinary fantastic characters – and how enabling either plays a role in the users’ situated contexts, including the creation of coherent life stories, narratives of personal experience, and narratives of personal identity. This paper provides theory and pilot evidence as steps toward answering these questions. Our evidence was elicited using grounded theory techniques on data collected in a three-year design-based research study into fostering at-risk students’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning using virtual world technologies. 1 We propose a three-axis model of user stances in relationship to their avatars. Using insights from the cognitive science theory of conceptual blending in order to characterize users’ perspectives of their avatars as imaginative integrations of their real and virtual selves, we present a set of case studies illustrating users’ stances in terms of our three axes. The upshot is that students in the study tended to fall into one of three categories: (1) viewing their avatars as necessarily reflections of their real world identities, (2) viewing their avatars as mere proxies for building artifacts in the world, and (3) viewing avatars as characters external to themselves for engaging in a play of identity performance and presentation. Group (1) found the affordances of the virtual world tools they used to be inadequate, hence serving the needs of this group may require alternative design solutions in light of real world values, activities, and behaviors.

Confronting destruction: Social context and life story in the diaries of two adolescents in Eastern European ghettos during the Shoah.

Life-writing, such as in diaries and memoirs, offers a means for managing misfortune and fosters an enhanced sense of self-coherence. The devastation that accompanied the effort by the Third Reich to destroy Europe's Jewish citizens challenged resilience, sense of personal agency, and the capacity to deal with personal loss and the destruction of community. The capacity for writing a coherent life story first emerges during adolescence. Reporting on the diaries of two adolescents living in Eastern European ghettos, this study considers the coping techniques that these adolescent diarists used even as they confronted their own demise. At the same time, the differing social contexts of the Łódź and Vilna ghettos posed somewhat different challenges to the resilience of these diarists. This study considers both life-writing and coping in the context both of adolescent psychological development and social context using Lazarus' portrayal of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping as conditions became ever more dire in each ghetto.