Incoherent Narratives Research Articles

Alzheimer's disease recognition from spontaneous speech using large language models

AbstractWe propose a method to automatically predict Alzheimer's disease from speech data using the ChatGPT large language model. Alzheimer's disease patients often exhibit distinctive characteristics when describing images, such as difficulties in recalling words, grammar errors, repetitive language, and incoherent narratives. For prediction, we initially employ a speech recognition system to transcribe participants' speech into text. We then gather opinions by inputting the transcribed text into ChatGPT as well as a prompt designed to solicit fluency evaluations. Subsequently, we extract embeddings from the speech, text, and opinions by the pretrained models. Finally, we use a classifier consisting of transformer blocks and linear layers to identify participants with this type of dementia. Experiments are conducted using the extensively used ADReSSo dataset. The results yield a maximum accuracy of 87.3% when speech, text, and opinions are used in conjunction. This finding suggests the potential of leveraging evaluation feedback from language models to address challenges in Alzheimer's disease recognition.

The politics of migration policy implementation in Ghana

AbstractThis article dives into the complex web of actors and processes of migration policy implementation in Ghana, revealing political tensions as they play out in this field. The analysis is based on semi‐structured interviews with bureaucrats and practitioners involved in migration governance initiatives in Ghana. The study reveals how institutional power hierarchies and funding structures affect execution processes on the ground. Mapping out observations concerning implementation as it is experienced across the vertical scale of involved actors, the study reveals that politics are engrained in Ghanaian migration policy implementation through experiences of (1) incoherent narratives on policy and migration; (2) local‐level exclusion from policy design; and (3) mismatch between policy targets and local realities. The article concludes by contemplating theoretical needs and proposing avenues for future research.

Heritage ambivalences: the aesthetics of fictionalised pasts in Roca Barea’s Imperiofobia

ABSTRACT Roca Barea’s Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra (Empirephobia and Black Legend) has been a bestseller in Spain since it was published in 2016. However, this historical essay has also provoked intense controversy regarding the veracity of data presented and the ambivalence, or even incoherence, of its arguments. This article analyses Imperiofobia from a different point of view: as a heritage product with a strong narrative dimension. A heritage product can enable an individual story to be inserted into a collective mythological narrative, as in the case of this book. Imperiofobia encourages the reader to become involved in an epic war against the enemies of empires, as well as against the enemies of Spain (mainly the eurozone’s most powerful countries and progressive or left-wing intellectuals). This involvement dimension is essential to understand how, in general, ambivalent and even incoherent narratives about the past can be functional in socio-political dynamics.

Navigating Through the Narrative Montages: Including Voices of Older Adults With Dementia Through Collaborative Narrative Inquiry

Having the opportunity to express oneself is an important right to every human being. However, narratives of older adults with moderate to severe dementia are constantly ignored for their incoherence and inaccuracy. In most studies, their narratives were solely collected to measure their cognitive function, rendering their lived stories untold, unheard and undocumented. To include voices of older adults with moderate to severe dementia in research and liberate them from the patient identity, this article proposes collaborative narrative inquiry as a method to explore the meaning-making mechanisms and selfhood construction processes embedded in their incoherent narratives. Integrating narrative inquiry and collaborative analysis, collaborative narrative inquiry aims to collect, construct and deconstruct narratives of participants through an iterative and reflective way, in collaboration with caregivers. This method requires a paradigm shift from generating one essential truth of people’s lived experience to co-creating plural lived truths situated in different temporal, social and cultural backgrounds. Facilitating the proliferation of identities beyond the patient identity among older adults with moderate to severe dementia, collaborative narrative inquiry generates counter narratives against a single disease narrative. It de-marginalizes this group by inviting their voices back into the society, and destigmatises them by creating a new way to engage with them.

Theoretical Viewpoints and Mental Health Implications of Constructing and Deconstructing Narrative Identity

Considering the prevailing mental health issues among adolescents and the overall clinical population due to their incoherent personal narratives, there is a growing need for mental health professionals to integrate narrative therapy in their theoretical orientation and practical application. Therefore, the author of this paper focuses on various theoretical viewpoints toward constructing and deconstructing narrative identities along with the emphasis on mental health implications. This paper also presents a variety of counseling strategies that can be useful in different clinical settings to help clients in changing their personal narrative for the purpose of promoting mental health well-being.

Narrative coherence of autobiographical memories in women with borderline personality disorder and associations with childhood adversity

BackgroundPeople suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) seem to have incoherent autobiographical narratives. Tentative evidence suggests that reduced narrative coherence of autobiographical memories is associated with insecure attachment. However, it remains unknown whether incoherent autobiographical narratives in people with BPD are coupled to experiences of childhood trauma, which is highly prevalent in BPD.MethodWe examined if written autobiographical memories in 26 female participants with BPD had reduced narrative coherence relative to 28 healthy female controls and whether more incoherent narratives were associated with childhood trauma.ResultsAs hypothesized, results showed that compared to controls, the autobiographical memories in participants with BPD had reduced narrative coherence, specifically inadequate orientation about the narrative and lack of narrative structure. More self-reported childhood adversity was coupled to lower orientation across groups whereas increased childhood adversity showed a specific relationship to lowered narrative structure in BPD participants.ConclusionWomen with BPD had incoherent autobiographical narratives, and reduced narrative coherence was associated with more self-reported childhood adversity, which appeared to explain the group differences.

Be coherent and become heard: The multidimensional impact of narrative coherence on listeners\u2019 social responses

Previous research has suggested that sharing autobiographical memories in a coherent manner has a beneficial impact on consequent social reactions of listeners. In this experimental study, we were able to replicate earlier findings by demonstrating that listeners (N = 107) showed significantly more willingness to interact with, more social support towards, and a more positive attitude towards coherent than incoherent narrators. Remarkably, these beneficial effects of coherence were observed only for narratives about positive memories. Results are explained in the light of the relevance of positive memories for the social bonding function of autobiographical memory. Furthermore, earlier work was extended and refined by investigating effects of the individual constituting dimensions of coherence (context, chronology, theme) on social responses. In line with our predictions, the dimensions of chronology and theme were most important in impacting social responses of listeners. Possibly a reduction of the attraction effect due to increased effortful processing and reduced credibility due to insufficient emotional elaboration might explain these results respectively. Furthermore, social responses were worse when narratives were incoherent with regard to more than one dimension, in line with the expected additive effect. Overall, fully incoherent narratives, which had had low scores on context, chronology, and theme, had the most adverse effect on listeners’ social responses. This study adds significantly to the domain of memory and cognition by showing how cognitive psychological research would benefit from extending a merely intrapersonal perspective to include an interpersonal perspective that considers social implications of memory and cognition as well.

History textbooks in war-time: The use of Second World War narratives in 1990s war propaganda in the former Yugoslavia

While most studies of war propaganda assume a consistent nationalist ideology, 1990s war propaganda in the former Yugoslavia was produced against a backdrop of a yet-undismantled socialist ideological system. This article examines the strategies employed in transforming and manipulating Second World War (SWW) narratives in order to spread propaganda in three of the former Yugoslav republics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia) during the 1990s wars. It outlines five discursive strategies used by textbook authors in tweaking SWW narratives to fit present-day objectives. Despite an obvious effort invested by elites, we find that the revisions were done far from a systematic manner, often resulting in chronologically and ideologically incoherent narratives. We demonstrate that history rewriting in war-time is frequently a piecemeal, haphazard project, and point to the relevance of examining the broader structural transformations within which narrative rewriting occurs.

The seventh art? Art cinema and Ingmar Bergman from an audience perspective

ABSTRACT Art cinema is a contested concept within film studies. Making use of Ingmar Bergman and his films, most of which can be classified as art cinema, I explore art cinema as an interpretative strategy for audiences. First, I explore the concept theoretically and in relation to Bergman and his work. Next, I explore how historical audiences have used the concept in relation to Ingmar Bergman. Participants in Sweden (n = 21) and Belgium (n = 27) make sense of incoherent or incomprehensible narratives in relation to what is known about Bergman contextually. Applying art cinema is historically and culturally specific, and often to “show off” a certain cultural position.

Narrative intelligence in nursing: Storying patient lives in dementia care.

This paper examines narrative approaches to care within the context of dementia. It reviews the function of stories and explores some of the narrative genres that shape the cultural perceptions of dementia. We argue that narrative intelligence within healthcare is an important element in nurturing communal self-identity for people living with dementia. Listening and responding to stories and the cultural framework that this encompasses is an embodied action that is not just related to cognitive recall but situates us within a cultural community. People with dementia may have challenges in maintaining narrative legitimacy in the face of fractured stories and incoherent narratives. Health professionals can offer support in reframing and presenting counterstories that maintain identities that can potentially be marginalised, silenced and open to narrative foreclosure. This process requires health professionals to be attentive and responsive to how patients with dementia and their supporters construct and position the stories they tell and the meaning(s) they attach to them.

Incoherent Subjects, Incomplete Lives: The Limits of Spiritual Autobiography in Spain

For many years Teresa de Ávila’s Libro de la vida was considered an exceptional work of literature, in both senses of the word “exceptional”. The work of Isabelle Poutrin, Francisco Durán López and others has made us question one of these meanings: no one doubts Teresa’s great literary value, but we now know that hers is one of hundreds (if not more) spiritual autobiographies/diaries kept by early modern Spanish women (and a few men as well). None of these lesser known vidas are as comprehensive or polished as Teresa’s Vida, and many are fragmentary and even incoherent. Insofar as these partial accounts of spiritual graces have been studied or translated, they are often excerpted, paraphrased, or translated in such a way as to make them more legible than, I argue, they really are. I propose then to consider how we might integrate these failed (in the sense that their authors’ spiritual narratives were never deemed models for others), fragmentary, incomplete, and incoherent narratives into the study of the “spiritual autobiography”. This chapter will examine a selection of such autobiographies to make the argument that, by examining a more complete corpus of spiritual autobiographies, and not just the most polished and successful ones, we get a different and fuller picture of the possibilities and limits of women’s self-fashioning through language in the early modern period.

Listening to what cannot be said: Broken narratives and the lived body

The core of this special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education emerged from the Broken Narratives and the Lived Body conference held in 2016. The ‘Broken Narrative’ essays included in this issue open up a critical space for understanding and theorising illness narratives that defy a conventional cognitive ordering of the self as a bounded spatial and temporal entity. Here, we discuss how narratives might be ‘broken’ by discourse, trauma, ‘ill’ lived bodies and experiences that exceed linguistic representation. We trouble distinctions between coherent and incoherent narratives, attending to what gaps, silences and ‘nonsenses’ can convey about embodied illness experiences. Ultimately, we suggest that ‘breaks’ are in fact a continuation of embodied narration. This is shown in the ‘Art and Trauma’ forum of essays, which reveal how narrative silences can ‘infect’ other embodied subjects and be transformed, achieving musical or visual representation that allow us to apprehend the ‘constitutive outside’ of narratives of illness or trauma.

Preschoolers' self-regulation moderates relations between mothers' representations and children's adjustment to school.

Consistent with models of environmental sensitivity (Pluess, 2015), research suggests that the effects of parents' behaviors on child adjustment are stronger among children who struggle to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors compared with children with better self-regulation. This study extended prior research by assessing maternal representations of the child, which presumably underlie mothers' parenting behaviors, to evaluate the moderating influence of preschoolers' self-regulation on relations between mothers' representations and changes in children's negative and positive developmental adjustment outcomes from preschool to first grade. Participants were 187 mothers and their preschoolers. Mothers' representations were assessed via the coherence of their verbal narratives regarding their preschooler and teachers reported on preschoolers' self-regulation. In preschool and first grade, examiners rated children's externalizing behavior problems and ego-resilience, and teachers rated children's externalizing behavior problems and peer acceptance. Consistent with the environmental sensitivity framework, the coherence of mothers' narratives predicted changes in adjustment among children with self-regulation difficulties, but not among children with better self-regulation. Preschoolers with self-regulation difficulties whose mothers produced incoherent narratives showed increased externalizing behavior problems, decreased ego-resilience, and lower peer acceptance across the transition to school. In contrast, preschoolers with better self-regulation did not evidence such effects when their mothers produced incoherent narratives. The implications of these findings for understanding and supporting children's adjustment during the early school years are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mexico and the R2P Challenge: The Commitment Trap

In recent years, Mexico has presented mostly favourable views of the R2P concept. This is a radical change, since historically it had been a strong advocate of non-intervention norms. This essay argues that Mexico’s R2P position has been shaped and constrained by two incoherent domestic narratives: democratization and the war on drugs. These two narratives have led to an inconsistent and ambiguous record of compliance with human rights norms and R2P principles. Mexican authorities, who had been championing for the implementation of R2P, have now become victims of their own international commitments. This Latin American country thus needs to reconcile its two distinct domestic agendas if it aims to be seen as an R2P advocate. The goal of this study is to explore the inherent complex and at times contradictory relationship between domestic demands for democratization and securitization and R2P commitments, using Mexico as a critical case study.

You and What Army? Violence, The State, and Mexico's War on Drugs

In late 2010, WikiLeaks made public hundreds of private communications between US State Department facilities in Mexico and Washington, DC. The documents contain frank observations made by US bureaucrats and officials about Mexican politics and government, but are especially pointed in their treatment of Mexico's declared ‘War on Drugs', which, since 2006, has been the focus of unprecedented negotiation, cooperation, and tension between the two governments. With a few notable exceptions, geographers have largely stayed away from the study of illegal practices, and relatively little research in this area employs an explicitly spatial analytic. In this paper, we examine how the spatialization of the drug phenomenon operates as an official strategy of intervention – illicit phenomena like the illegal drug trade are rendered in spatial terms in order to become amenable to specific kinds of state intervention. This requires considerable boundary work, and we draw from the WikiLeaks archive to explore how state actors continuously work to materially and discursively isolate trafficking from a larger social, political and institutional context. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contradictory and incoherent narratives and conditions that constantly threaten to overflow these constructed boundaries, along with the structuring assumptions of the drug war.

Maternal stress and internalizing symptoms in preschoolers: the moderating role of narrative coherence.

In the present study, we examined whether maternal psychosocial stress and children's coherence in story-stem narratives are associated with preschool children's internalizing symptoms and disorders, and whether narrative coherence moderates the association between maternal stress and children's internalizing symptoms and disorders. The sample consists of 236 preschool children (129 girls, 107 boys; Mage = 5.15 years) and their mothers. Mothers completed questionnaires on their psychosocial stress burden and on child symptoms. A diagnostic interview (the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment; Egger & Angold, 2004) was conducted with one of the parents to assess children's psychiatric diagnoses. Children completed 8 story stems of the MacArthur Story Stem Battery (Bretherton & Oppenheim, 2003). Story-stem narratives were coded for narrative coherence. Multivariate analyses were controlled for children's age, gender, verbal performance, and externalizing symptoms. Results showed that maternal psychosocial stress was significantly associated with child internalizing symptoms and disorders. Neither maternal stress nor children's internalizing symptoms or disorders were associated with narrative coherence. However, narrative coherence moderated the association between maternal stress and child internalizing symptoms. For children with more incoherent narratives, the association between maternal psychosocial stress and children's internalizing symptoms was significantly stronger than for children with more coherent narratives. The moderation effect of narrative coherence concerning children's internalizing disorders was found not to be significant. Our findings indicate that preschool children's cognitive-emotional organization in dealing with relational conflict themes seems to buffer their mental health when exposed to adverse circumstances in their everyday family life.

Literary Disorders and Translation Treatment: Curing Chekhov's "The Black Monk"

Since the 1980s, one strand of translation theory has likened translators to psychoanalysts who treat incoherent narratives. This article uses Constance Garnett's 1917 translation of Chekhov's "The Black Monk" to study how translators seek to "cure" original texts. In this case, since Chekhov's protagonist is ill, the translator's treatment occurs at various levels of the narrative. The article is built around the longstanding conflict between foreignizing and domesticating translation theories, staged directly in the translator's struggle with the fictional character. The two practices are equated, over the course of the paper, with two medical modes: infection and inoculation. Chekhov's original text embraces the former, casting untranslatability as a necessary textual disease; his translator promotes the latter, disinfecting the original through her translation. Garnett's translation strategy discloses an anxiety provoked by Chekhov's story, and also reveals more generally how illness may be necessary to the transmission of texts.

Coping with traumatic memories: Second World War veterans' experiences of social support in relation to the narrative coherence of war memories

ABSTRACTThis paper reports a qualitative study that used narrative analysis to explore how social support helps many armed-services veterans cope with traumatic memories. The analysis was carried out on two levels, that of narrative form (level of narrative coherence), argued to be indicative of reconciliation, and narrative content (themes of social support), which allowed exploration of the types of social support experienced by veterans with coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Ten British male Second World War veterans were interviewed regarding their war experiences, presence of traumatic memories, and experiences of social support from comrades, family and society. Different patterns of support were qualitatively related to coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Veterans with coherent narratives were no less likely to have experienced traumatic events than those with reconciled or incoherent narratives, but they reported more positive perceptions of their war experience and of the war's outcomes, more positive experiences of communication with family in later life, and more positive perceptions of societal opinion. The results are discussed in relation to how veterans can be supported by family and friends to reconcile their traumatic memories, thus to lessen the burden in later life when vital support resources may be unavailable.

Cleveland 20 years on: themes of disruption and repair in the trauma narratives of children, adults and society

AbstractThis is the second of two linked papers which explores coherent and incoherent narratives emerging from Cleveland. It draws a parallel between the disrupted narratives of child and adult survivors of child sexual abuse and professional and societal narratives of Cleveland. The paper looks at the therapeutic task of individual repair using attachment‐based therapy, illustrated by clinical examples. It identifies five key challenges relevant to repair in the interpersonal, intra‐personal and societal domains. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Psychodynamic Supervision as Narrative

Psychoanalytic theorists in the narrative tradition have argued that psychotherapy cures not by exposing the past, but by replacing confused and disjointed stories with clearer and more harmonious ones. These views are grounded in a conviction that a personal narrative reflects one's inner organization and self-concept, bestowing meaning on experiences and the ways in which narratives are storied is what infuses the flow of life with meaning. The present paper suggests that the material a supervisee brings to a psychodynamic supervisory session meets the criteria for narrative, insofar as the supervisee organizes the therapeutic events, attributes meaning to them and then relates them to the supervisor. Also discussed in the paper are the prototypical methods used by supervisors to reorganize their supervisees' narratives of therapy and to replace them with more refined and appealing versions, by calling attention to certain issues and theoretical considerations. The paper recommends that supervisors refrain from “correcting” or dismissing supervisees' inconsistent and incoherent narratives without understanding the basic causes for such narrative “flaws.” It also proposes that supervisees' original narratives be enriched and enhanced through use of an approach which pinpoints instances of incomprehension in the narratives.