Key Terms

• Novel: extended prose narratives that imaginatively depict the experience of being human through a sequences of events involving a particular group of persons living in a particular time and place

• Personal script: A predictable pattern of emotion and behaviour played out over time.

• Autobiographical memory: Is inaccurate for details but better at conveying the emotional gist of particular events

• Reminiscence bump: People tend to recall a disproportionate number of episodic memories between the ages of 15 and 25 years old.

• Paradigmatic mode: Explains how the world works through logic, empirical proof, theories, and arguments. Aims to reveal the truth

• Verisimilitude: Lifelikeness, human plausibility → characteristic of stories.

• Infantile amnesia: The absence of any autobiographical memories from the first 2/3 years of life.

• Narrative mode of human thought: People create stories about intentional agents who pursue goals over time. Aims to explain why people do what they do

• Narrative identity: Internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to provide his/her life with unity, purpose, and meaning.

• Conversational elaboration: Children are asked to reflect and elaborate upon their emotions, thoughts, and desires

• Modern sense of selfhood: In the modern world, people tend to see themselves as multifaceted, complex entities who develop over time and who are responsible for their own development.

• Scaffolding: Stimulating the child’s recollection and telling of the past by reminding the child of recent events

• Self-defining memory: Vivid, affectively charged, repetitive, linked to other similar memories, and related to an important unresolved theme or recurrent concern in an individual’s life

• Children's stories: Are based on lived experience

• Autobiographical author: storytellers of the self who try to make sense out of the confusion of modern life by constructing integrative self-narratives, complete with settings, scenes, characters, plots and themes

• Stories: paradigmatic expressions of human thought

• Stories: teach us how to be human

• Emerging adulthood: period encompassing adolescence and the early adult years when human beings confront the challenge of self-authorship

• Autobiographical reasoning: wide set of interpretive operations through which people derive personal meanings from their own autobiographical memories

• Life story: the idea of the person’s own internalized and changing story about who he/she was, is, and may become

Researchers - Theories

• Erickson: believes that formulating an identity marks a person’s psychosocial transition into adulthood

Experiments

• Lifetime exposure to good fiction is positively correlated with social skills and empathy

• Reading stories appears to activate neural representations of social experience

• Autistic children often display deficits in both theory-of-mind abilities and self-storytelling skills because they do not understand human agency

• Mothers encourage daughters more than sons to share emotional experiences such as memories of negative events that produced sadness

• Girls use more emotion words than boys in their autobiographical recollections and their stories tend to be richer in context and meaning

• Mothers who employ elaborative conversational styles with their children result in their children having more developed and richer autobiographical memories and more detailed stories about themselves

• Mothers of securely attached children use more elaborative and evaluative strategies

• Securely attached children are more responsive in the conversations they have with their mothers about personal events

• People are eager to derive lessons and insights from negative emotional scenes in life, searching for redemptive meanings in suffering and adversity

• Psychotherapy patients who experience successful therapeutic outcomes tend to organize memories of particular therapy sessions to tell a heroic story of individual triumph over an implacable antagonist

• People routinely divide the autobiographical past into extended life periods (adolescence) that are punctuated by symbolic temporal markers (leaving home) and particular episodes that stand out in memory

• Memories students deemed important enough to be considered part of the narrative identity were rated by them as more emotionally intense, more relevant to their current goals and more likely to have been shared with other people

• When people repeatedly describe specific events in their lives to others, and when they are reinforced or affirmed for doing so, the stories of those events tend to be retained and incorporated into a person’s sense of self

• Stories in which the narrator violated serious norms of propriety or betrays another’s trust are rarely told so they rarely assume a significant position in a person’s narrative identity

• Life stories are related to but not the same thing as a person’s goals, values and traits

• Students high in C tend to narrate autobiographical memories that follow a script of finding joy in accomplishment

• Students high in A tend to emphasize memories about finding joy in affiliation with others

• Students high in N tend to construct stories about their lives that exhibit past trauma, fear, negative emotion, less growth, less emphasis on attitudes and perspectives about the outside world

• People high in N are quick to identity contamination sequences in their life stories

• High levels of O are associated with telling especially complex stories containing multiple plots and distinctions and with higher levels of narrative coherence

• Students who are high in O, C and E tended to tell exploratory stories of change

• Themes of growth and intrinsic motivation in the participants’ stories still accounted for sizable portions of the variance in self-reported well-being

• People with strong power motivation tend to construct personal narratives that feature themes such as self-mastery, status, victory, achievement, empowerment and responsibility

• People with strong intimacy motivation tend to construct more communal life narratives emphasizing themes of love, friendship, dialogue, caring for others and belongingness

• Political conservatives tend to emphasize themes of strict-father morality in their life stories and to prioritize values linked to authority, loyalty, and sacredness

• Political liberals tend to emphasize themes of nurturant-caregiver morality and prioritize values linked to alleviating harm and promoting fairness

• When asked what life would be like without a religious perspective, Christian conservatives imagined a hot and chaotic hell and Christian liberals imagined a cold and lifeless void

Examples

• Human beings are storytellers by nature

• Stories do not explain well the physical and chemical world

• The religious creation stories are beautiful examples of the narrative mode

• The theory of evolution can’t use the narrative mode but can use the paradigmatic mode

• A good story engages our emotions and functions to entertain us

• The inherent appeal of the narrative lies in its ability to abstract and simulate social experiences

• Storytellers should build up a kind of suspense and then resolve the tension at the end

• Autobiographical authorship depends on motivated agency

• Autobiographical memory and self-storytelling develop in a social context

• Having a coherent identity means that people can count on you to display a characteristic pattern of feeling and behaviour from one situation to the next

• Martin Luther: worked through his identity struggles and formed a new life narrative

• Identity is an integrated life story

• Formulating a narrative identity involves reconstructing the past and imagining the future in order to explain how you have become the person you are becoming

• Narrative identity is a personal myth that provides meaning and verisimilitude more than objective truth

• The cognitive skills and personal experiences required for the development of a narrative identity are available in the adolescent years

• Gender, ethnicity, race, and social class shape the process of constructing a narrative identity

• Obama’s first autobiographical book (Dreams) presents his narrative identity as he understood it to be at the age of 30

• Focusing on the subjective perspective of the autobiographical narrator comes closer to what the concept of narrative identity is about

• The narrative identity is the person’s life story

• Most of what happens in the past is forgotten and what does get remembered is subjectively shaped by current concerns and future goals

• Narrative identity uses autobiographical memory to create a story that feels right to the narrator

• Infantile amnesia reflects the human brain’s delay in establishing a basic sense of selfhood

• Some scenes are self-defining because they reflect a central, psychologically significant pattern in the life story

Tables/Figures

Table 8.1

• Autobiographical memory: appears at 2-3 years old

• Theory of mind: appears at 3-4 years old

• Story grammar: appears at 5-6 years old

• Cultural script: appears at10-14 years old

• Autobiographical reasoning and advanced storytelling skills: appears at 12-25 years old

Table 8.3

• Agency: the degree to which a protagonist is able to affect change in their life

• Communion: the degree to which the protagonist experiences interpersonal connection through love, friendship, dialogue, or connection to a broad collective

• Redemption: scenes in which a demonstrably “bad” or emotionally negative event leads to a demonstrably “good” or positive outcome

• Contamination: scenes in which a good or positive event turns dramatically bad or negative such that negative emotion overwhelms, destroys, or erases the effects of the preceding positivity

• Coherence: the extent to which a narrative demonstrates clear causal sequencing, thematic integrity, and appropriate integration of emotional responses

• Complexity: the level of structural differentiation and integration shown in the narrative (simple vs. complex stories)

• Meaning making: the degree to which the protagonist learns something or gleans a message from an event