Emotional Stories Research Articles

A research coding method for the basic patient-centered interview

ObjectiveTo develop a more reliable coding method of medical interviewing focused on data-gathering and emotion-handling. MethodsTwo trained (30h) undergraduates rated videotaped interviews from 127 resident-simulated patient (SP) interactions. Trained on 45 videotapes, raters coded 25 of 127 study set tapes for patient-centeredness. Guetzkow’s U, Cohen’s Kappa, and percent of agreement were used to measure raters’ reliability in unitizing and coding residents’ skills for eliciting: agenda (3 yes/no items), physical story (2), personal story (6), emotional story (15), using indirect skills (4), and general patient-centeredness (3). Results45 items were dichotomized from the earlier, Likert scale-based method and were reduced to 33 during training. Guetzkow’s U ranged from 0.00 to 0.087. Kappa ranged from 0.86 to 1.00 for the 6 variables and 33 individual items. The overall kappa was 0.90, and percent of agreement was 97.5%. Percent of agreement by item ranged from 84 to 100%. ConclusionsA simple, highly reliable coding method, weighted (by no. of items) to highlight personal elements of an interview, was developed and is recommended as a criterion standard research coding method. Practice implicationsAn easily conducted, reliable coding procedure can be the basis for everyday questionnaires like patient satisfaction with patient-centeredness.

Lateral and medial prefrontal contributions to emotion generation by semantic elaboration during episodic encoding.

Memories for emotion-laden stimuli are remembered more accurately than those for neutral stimuli. Although this enhancement reflects stimulus-driven modulation of memory by emotions, functional neuroimaging evidence of the interacting mechanisms between emotions generated by intentional processes, such as semantic elaboration, and memory is scarce. The present fMRI study investigated how encoding-related activation is modulated by emotions generated during the process of semantic elaboration. During encoding with fMRI, healthy young adults viewed neutral (target) pictures either passively or with semantic elaboration. In semantic elaboration, participants imagined background stories related to the pictures. Encoding trials with semantic elaboration were subdivided into conditions in which participants imagined negative, positive, or neutral stories. One week later, memories for target pictures were tested. In behavioral results, memories for target pictures were significantly enhanced by semantic elaboration, compared to passive viewing, and the memory enhancement was more remarkable when negative or positive stories were imagined. fMRI results demonstrated that activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) were greater during the encoding of target pictures with semantic elaboration than those with passive viewing, and that these activations further increased during encoding with semantic elaboration of emotional stories than of neutral stories. Functional connectivity between the left inferior frontal gyrus and dmPFC/hippocampus during encoding significantly predicted retrieval accuracies of memories encoded with self-generated emotional stories. These findings suggest that networks including the left inferior frontal region, dmPFC, and hippocampus could contribute to the modulation of memories encoded with the emotion generation.

Motivation and Memory

Abstract. The present study investigated the compensatory impact of motivation to learn on memory performance with age. Twenty-one university undergraduate young adults (M = 22.7, SD = 2.6) and 19 community-dwelling older adults (M = 72.7, SD = 6.6) performed an emotional story memory task with an immediate and delayed recall 7 days later. The emotional content and the age relevance of the stories were manipulated to increase the motivation of older adults to learn. As postulated, results showed no age differences on the recall of positive stories, whereas the recall of negative and neutral stories was lower for older than young adults. In conclusion, motivational aspects may lead to the equivalent memory performance of young and older adults.

Botanics Revisited IV

Abstract Botanics Revisited IV takes its starting point from my personal attachment to the New Zealand bush – isolating the foliage qualities of texture, colour, light filtration, patterning and visual layering in software programs such as Photoshop®, Illustrator® and After Effects® to create parallels to thought processes. The first steps are undertaken by printing a simple mathematical triangular pattern on watercolour paper (reflective of how information and experience link to unconscious cultural knowledge and emotional stories, directing the way we interact with and perceive the world) and then I let my mind wander while brushing pigment into the above, each stage in turn being photographically documented, to see the texture growing like an organic mass, thoughts and reactions connecting, creating understanding and the personal within the boundaries of the pattern. Secondly, a time-based data projection is created by transferring the above watercolour documentation into After Effects®; exploring editing, filtering, scale, speed, rotation and layering images as possible visual vehicles to mimic memory storage and recall in the brain. The multifaceted and constantly changing nature of the artworks reflects how the brain tries to make sense of the visual world, searching for similarities between the here and now and what we have done and seen before; our current mood and mind state overlaying our prior experience, filtering and combining the here and now with what has been.

Communicating Emotions: How Commercial Manga for Women Approaches 3.11

Hagio Moto’s manga series Nanohana was one of the first attempts in female-oriented mainstream manga to depict the 3.11 tragedy and its aftermath. However, it appears to lack in overt social critique, providing instead a highly emotional story about overcoming hardship and maturing. Via a close-reading of Nanohana this article analyzes the modus operandi of social critique in popular manga highlighting the visual conventions of female manga genres and thereby going beyond the plotlines, which have been at the center of critical attention so far. The article contrasts the initial one-shot “Nanohana,” which directly addresses 3.11, with the subsequent three one-shots that anthropomorphize nuclear elements. Leaning on Thomas LaMarre’s theory of plastic and structural lines, Nanohana is analyzed in regard to signification and affect by correlating the manga’s varying line work with issues of gender, especially the dynamics of the gaze, as theoretically developed by Oshiyama, Nagaike, Ōgi and Ishida. Respectively, the visualization of popular gender stereotypes in shōjo and josei manga comes to the fore. Special attention is paid to how visual gender constructs help the reader to differentiate between “self” and “other” on the levels of signification and affect, and how the resulting identification and dissociation aid in approaching the traumatic nuclear accident.

Thunder Boy Jr. by Sherman Alexie

Reviewed by: Thunder Boy Jr. by Sherman Alexie Deborah Stevenson, Editor Alexie, Sherman Thunder Boy Jr.; illus. by Yuyi Morales. Little, 2016 34p ISBN 978-0-316-01372-7 $17.99 R* 4-7 yrs “Thunder Boy is not a normal name,” says our distressed narrator, who is his father’s namesake. The moniker doesn’t work for Thunder Boy Jr., though: “People call me Little Thunder. That nickname makes me sound like a burp or a fart.” Much as he loves his dad, he wants his own name, and he dreams of various possibilities. He is therefore thrilled when his father understands his son’s dilemma and gives him a new name, Lightning (“My dad and I will light up the sky”). Alexie demonstrates his familiar gift for storytelling, using seemingly uncomplicated language to tell a layered and emotional story that retains tension despite being full of love. A note explains the inspirations for Morales’ digital line and color illustrations; the smooth lines are softly organic in their curves, while the deft use of textures gives depth to the earthtoned elements. Even with the boy’s complaint, this is a joyous portrait of a family, with the visual motifs of a big red ball and a colorful painted guitar running through the spreads, and both Mom and Dad have some flair (Mom rides a motorcycle, for instance) as well as thoroughly enjoying their children. Plenty of kids will recognize the shared-name dilemma, and even those free of the anxiety of name influence will recognize Lightning’s jubilance at being recognized and understood by his father: “My dad read my mind! My dad read my heart!” [End Page 505] Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A General Look at Women Taking Shelters: What are they living through? What can we do?

Violence is an important social issue to which the women are exposed the most. Women shelters are one of the responsive services for the women experiencing violence. In this research, we planned to make situational detection on sociodemographic characteristics and the properties related to the violence they experienced and origin families for the women taking shelters and search for feasible additional social support and protective precautions in light of the analysis. By interviewing 46 cases living in Ankara Women Shelter face to face, a socidemographic form, SCID-1, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-28) were applied. The average age of cases is 31.46±8.36 years. By CTQ-28, it is detected emotional in %75, physical in % 65.4 and sexual abuse in % 51, other than that %69.2 physical and % 55.8 emotional neglect story. There were behaviour of violence in mothers of %28.8, fathers of %36.5 and siblings of %15.4 of the cases. Duration of marriageis 10.52±9.96 years, marriage age is 18.48±4.29 years and the average duration of getting exposed to violence in their marriage is 11.44±8.27 years. It is declared that the cases were exposed to % 96.2 physical, % 84.6 emotional, %92.3 verbal, % 25 sexual and %78.8 economicalviolence, %65.4 of them experienced violence also in pregnancy and for %35.3 pregnancy was effected from the violence. In %54.2 of the cases there were detected suicide attempt history and the most (% 65.4) major depression primary diagnosis. It can be said with our current findings that the women taking shelters has been facing violence since their childhood, couldn’t get enough economical and social support from their families and experienced several mental illnesses with their trauma. Individual strengthening, supporting, providing the psychiatrist applications and pharmacotheraphy treatments in necessary conditions, appyling group and individual theraphies will provide women to be strengthened psychologically until they leave the shelters. On the other hand, providing educational-professional development and labor facilities will enable women to survive after they leave the shelter. Keywords: women’s shelter, violence, women

Dirt Meridian by Andrew Moore

Reviewed by: Dirt Meridian by Andrew Moore Amanda Breitbach Dirt Meridian. Photographs by Andrew Moore. Bologna, Italy: Damiani Publishers, 2015. 132 pp. $50.00 cloth. Aerial photographs tend to make any landscape more abstract, and usually more distant. But that is not the case in Dirt Meridian, a new book by photographer Andrew Moore. Moore brings a tender perspective to his images of the American landscape along the one hundredth meridian, often considered the dividing line between fertile east and arid west. Dwelling in the seldom-pictured heart of the Great Plains, a region sometimes called “flyover country,” Moore sensitively captures a vast, open land marked by a history of human use. Romantic views of stock ponds illuminated by golden light and cattlemen on horseback are balanced by images of crumbling homesteads, munitions storage bunkers, and barracks-style housing for oil-field workers. From a hawk’s-eye view, he shows us both the West of our imagination and the West that is. Back on the ground, carefully framed portraits and interiors fill in a complicated story about people and place. The book reproduces seventy-two of Moore’s photographs, beautifully printed and accompanied by several thoughtful essays. Kent Haruf (late author of Plainsong) sets a contemplative, loving tone in the preface, writing of the Plains landscape, “It may not be pretty, but it’s beautiful if you know how to look at it.” An essay by Toby Jurovics, chief curator at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, places Moore in a lineage from the early survey photographers up through Robert Adams and Emmett Gowin, artists who helped redefine landscape photography by bringing human impact to the forefront. A second essay by Inara Verzemnieks, an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, serves as a written companion to the images, telling emotional stories of many of the people and places pictured and off ering us context. Moore’s photographs give us an appreciation for the scale of the Plains landscape and a sense of perspective: people are small here. Images of abandoned schoolhouses and isolated windmills help us understand the tenuous [End Page 338] nature of agriculture in the region and the potential for human failure, while photographs of pipelines, gravel pits, and broken pivots reveal an economy dependent on extracting and exploiting natural resources. Together with these foreboding elements, Moore also gives us hope for the future. Portraits of young people raised on Plains ranches and grazing bison seem to point to a way forward. His book is an honest and unblinking document of the American Great Plains, full of quiet beauty, heartbreak, and hope. Amanda Breitbach Department of Art Truman State University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Demonstratives in Võro and Estonian oral narratives

The paper discusses the nature of Estonian and Võro demonstrative systems used by nine bilingual respondents when narrating an emotional past story in both languages. The main interests were whether the Võro three-way person-oriented demonstrative system has disintegrated, what systems are used instead and how the Võro and Estonian demonstrative systems interact with each other in the same respondent. It was found that the Võro three-way person-oriented demonstrative system has almost disappeared and three main types of demonstrative systems are used in its place. The respondents combine Võro and Estonian demonstrative systems differently and no clear patterns can be established.

The Opportunity in Death.

I t was my first week on the intensive care rotation, and I stepped into the intensive care unit (ICU) with a sense of fear. The constant beeping of patient monitors kept me on my toes. I knew, deep down, that the patients I was going to care for were very sick. Their status could change at any time. I was responsible for the care of 6 patients. One of them, Benson, needed an emergency blood transfusion. He gazed up at me, and reached out for my hand. I held his hand while he was poked multiple times. His veins had been chronically fibrosed by all of the central lines he had to endure. Another patient, Rose, who needed open heart surgery, told me, ‘‘I want a hot young cardiothoracic surgeon to operate on me!’’ Moments later, an older, not-so-goodlooking surgeon stepped into the room. We both laughed. The next day Rose went into the operating room. I was sitting in a conference, like any other day, when I heard my pager buzzing. I dialed the number as I had a thousand other times, expecting a simple question from the nurse and a quick answer from me. The voice on the phone said, ‘‘Rose has passed away on the operating table; she did not make it.’’ Suddenly the air felt thin and I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt a sense of emptiness set in and the world stopped moving. How could this have happened? I was just laughing with her an hour ago; I could still see her smiling face. The tears started streaking down my face, which, like everything else, I could not control. Benson’s body gave up the night before after 1 hour of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Just like that, 2 of my patients, within a few hours of each other, were gone. I realized how much they had touched me in just the few moments we had shared. As upset as I was, I did find comfort from my colleagues and the staff. Within a few minutes, I received pats on my back, hugs, and comforting text messages. Our program is like a high school in that news travels fast. Many residents told me emotional stories about losing their first patients. I felt thankful for everyone’s kind words, but a part of me kept asking: Just how do you learn to cope? For many, discussing death is taboo. With medical advances, patients live longer and death is equated with failure by many physicians. Patients expect physicians to ‘‘save them,’’ and often want everything (eg, intubation, chest compressions) to be done in case of a cardiac or pulmonary arrest. When I stood among my class at medical school graduation, and we pledged to first do no harm, this seemed straightforward. Now I see the potential contradiction when it comes to changing a code status. When addressing terminal diseases and end-of-life care, there are no algorithms to follow. My medical school offered a simulated patient laboratory to teach us how to announce bad news. For my role play, the short scenario had read, ‘‘You are here to discuss the CT [computed tomography] findings with your patient: a large 8-centimeter lung mass was found suggestive of cancer.’’ I stepped into the simulation room then with the same feeling of apprehension as when I entered the ICU as a resident. I knew that once I announced the imaging results to my patient, I might elicit a reaction that I could not control. What you cannot control scares you. One of my pulmonary critical care attending physicians told me how he coped: ‘‘Ethics . . . if I can go to sleep at the end of the day, I know I have done the right thing.’’ In the ICU, I quickly discovered that these discussions and decisions are far more complex than one’s personal ethics. Every situation, every individual, is different. Later in my ICU rotation I cared for Sandy. Sandy was a woman in her seventies, recently diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She was receptor positive, with a good prognosis, and undergoing chemotherapy treatment. Then, a dose of chemotherapy resulted in Sandy ending up in the ICU with multiorgan failure. Suddenly her prognosis was poor. I stood by my attending physician and listened as he discussed code status and prognosis with Sandy. She kept saying, ‘‘I don’t want any more chemotherapy, but I want to live.’’ A couple of days later, Sandy developed a gastrointestinal bleed. We had 2 choices: to intubate her or to give her morphine and change her code DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-15-00013.1

Researching the researcher: the heart and mind in sub-prime times

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gather research-stories, that is, the stories of the researcher themselves. The authors gather stories that situate researchers in their social, political, personal and professional contexts to learn about being a researcher in a University at this particular historical moment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ stories began with the naive question – “What is it like to be a researcher in a University right now?”. The authors asked this question of Julie White’s (2012) “disposable academics” (p. 50); short-term and casualised staff with insecure teaching or research contracts. They asked White’s (2012, p. 48) “academic infantry” the mid-career researchers who have felt the labour intensification of recent times. They also asked senior academics, established professors with established research histories and the security (they hope) of a steady track record and a list of external grants. Findings – The answers were not simple. They were stories of the pragmatics of managing the new academic scene; maintaining a research passion despite the pressures of new managerialism’s focus on certain forms of efficiency, external accountability and monitoring; resolving the apparent losses of autonomy, academic freedom, support, security and academic dignity. The authors heard emotional and vulnerable stories, stories of personal investment and emotionally and physically risky and dangerous encounters. The authors learnt something of the complex business of negotiating personal and professional subjectivities. Originality/value – The authors heard emotional and vulnerable stories, stories of personal investment and emotionally and physically risky and dangerous encounters. They learnt something of the complex business of negotiating personal and professional subjectivities.

Democratizing Academic Writing: A Revision of an Experience of Writing an Autoethnographic Dissertation in Color

In this paper, I revise my experience of writing an autoethnographic ( Ellis, 2004) dissertation in the field of family therapy as a Colombian mestiza. I discuss how I grappled with my writing, and, in the process, stumbled into matters of democratizing texts. I problematize male - dominant academic standards, telling of the tensions when maneuvering at marking cultural and gender differences in my text. I focus on the storywriting of my storytelling when writing aesthetic, evocative, and emotional stories as a woman of color, at the intersection between autobiography and ethnography (Ellis, 2004). I discern elements of my handicraft as an artisan autoethnographer in training, taking from my local knowledge and family therapy training, in particular narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990). I include excerpts of my dissertation to illustrate how my narrative therapy practices, intermingled with my cultural storytelling traditions, assisted me in shaping my idiosyncratic autoethnographic stories. I hope to add to the diversification of writing in the academia to make it more democratic and accessible; and to continue conversations about alternative ways to go about it.

Effect of Emotion Expression with Blinking Colored Eyes of a Robot on Emotional Story Understanding

Effect of Emotion Expression with Blinking Colored Eyes of a Robot on Emotional Story Understanding

Reviewing the Review: A Text Analysis of Why Experience Reviews Receive Positive Feedback

Consumer online reviews are the most influential form of word of mouth after recommendations from family and friends. What types of reviews receive more positive feedback from consumers reading them? Although prior work provides a valid description of positive feedback on reviews of material purchases, it does not encompass positive feedback on reviews of experiential purchases. We assert that these experience reviews have a narrative structure. To test this assertion, we mined 190,461 reviews of 989 experiences on TripAdvisor, adapted contemporary quantitative techniques, and conducted an automated text analysis. We find that narrative structure elements of (1) identifiable characters, (2) an imaginable plot, and (3) genres, which involve changing emotional story shapes, are associated with more positive feedback. Thus, the narrative structure of experience reviews generates their positive feedback.

The good, the bad, and the neutral: The influence of emotional valence on young children's recall

Despite the important theoretical and applied implications, there is limited experimental research investigating the influence of emotional valence on young children's verbal recall of everyday emotional experiences. This issue was addressed in the current study. Specifically, we investigated young children's (5–6 years) recall of emotional experiences presented in six brief stories. To address methodological limitations of the small body of existing literature, we adopted a within participants design in which story content was matched and valence (positive, negative, neutral) was counterbalanced across stories. Fifty-four children were presented the six stories via narrated slideshow, and recall was assessed after delay. Results showed that emotional stories were better recalled than neutral stories and negatively valenced stories were better recalled than positively valenced stories. The recall advantage of negatively valenced information was found for all aspects of each story, suggesting that negative valence renders events particularly memorable.

Insular cortex: structural and functional neuroanatomy.

Insular cortex: structural and functional neuroanatomy.

Deconstructing therapeutic mechanisms in cancer support groups: do we express more emotion when we tell stories or talk directly to each other?

Studies indicate that story-telling and emotional expression may be important therapeutic mechanisms. This study examined how they work together over 1 year of supportive-expressive group therapy (SET). Participants were 41 women randomized to SET. We coded emotional expression and story types (story vs. non-story) at the initial session, 4, 8, and 12 months. Women engaged in more storytelling in their initial than later sessions. In later sessions, women expressed significantly more emotion, specifically compassion and high-arousal positive affect. Direct communication (non-story) allowed more positive but also more defensive expression as women supported and challenged each other. Greater hostility in non-story and greater constrained anger during story were associated with increasing depression. Greater high-arousal positive affect in non-story and greater primary negative affect in story were associated with increasing social network size. These results inform clinicians about cues they might use to improve the effectiveness of cancer support groups.

Defining entertainment: an approach

Entertainment is a key cultural category. Yet the definition of entertainment can differ depending upon whom one asks. This article maps out understandings of entertainment in three key areas. Within industrial discourses, entertainment is defined by a commercial business model. Within evaluative discourses used by consumers and critics, it is understood through an aesthetic system that privileges emotional engagement, story, speed and vulgarity. Within academia, entertainment has not been a key organizing concept within the humanities, despite the fact that it is one of the central categories used by producers and consumers of culture. It has been important within psychology, where entertainment is understood in a solipsistic sense as being anything that an individual finds entertaining. Synthesizing these approaches, the authors propose a cross-sectoral definition of entertainment as ‘audience-centred commercial culture’.

Report of the joint ESOT and TTS basic science meeting 2013: current concepts and discoveries in translational transplantation.

A joint meeting organized by the European (ESOT) and The Transplantation (TTS) Societies for basic science research was organized in Paris, France, on November 7-9, 2013. Focused on new ideas and concepts in translational transplantation, the meeting served as a venue for state-of-the-art developments in basic transplantation immunology, such as the potential for tolerance induction through regulation of T-cell signaling. This meeting report summarizes important insights which were presented in Paris. It not only offers an overview of established aspects, such as the role of Tregs in transplantation, presented by Nobel laureate Rolf Zinkernagel, but also highlights novel facets in the field of transplantation, that is cell-therapy-based immunosuppression or composite tissue transplantation as presented by the emotional story given by Vasyly Rohovyy, who received two hand transplants. The ESOT/TTS joint meeting was an overall productive and enjoyable platform for basic science research in translational transplantation and fulfilled all expectations by giving a promising outlook for the future of research in the field of immunological transplantation research.

Frontal and temporal lobe contributions to emotional enhancement of memory in behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Emotional events gain special priority in how they are remembered, with emotionally arousing events typically recalled more vividly and with greater confidence than non-emotional events. In dementia, memory and emotion processing are affected to varying degrees, however, whether emotional enhancement of memory for complex ecologically-valid events is differentially affected across dementia syndromes remains unclear, with previous studies examining effects of emotion on simple visual recognition only. Here, we examined memory for an emotionally arousing short story and a closely matched, emotionally neutral story in behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) (n = 13) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) (n = 14), and contrasted their performance with healthy controls (n = 12). Multiple-choice recognition memory for specific details of the story was assessed after a 1-h delay. While AD and control groups showed enhanced memory for the emotional story, the bvFTD group recalled a similar number of details from the emotional and neutral stories. Voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed emotional enhancement of memory correlated with distinct brain regions in each patient group. In AD, emotional enhancement was associated with integrity of the bilateral hippocampus, parahippocampal gyri, temporal fusiform gyrus and frontal pole, regions typically implicated in memory processes. In contrast in bvFTD, integrity of emotion processing regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex, right amygdala and right insula, correlated with the extent emotion enhanced memory. Our results reveal that integrity of frontal and temporal regions determine the quality and nature of emotional memories. While emotional enhancement of memory is present in mild AD, in bvFTD emotion does not facilitate memory retrieval for complex realistic events. This attenuation of emotional enhancement is due to degradation of emotion processing regions, which may be important for modulating levels of arousal in response to emotional events in these patients.