Both sides of the story: Narratives of romantic infidelity

We applied a narrative identity approach to the study of romantic infidelity. In Study 1, participants provided narratives of the moment they discovered their partners' infidelity. In Study 2, participants were prompted for narratives of their unfaithful actions. In both studies, measures of personality traits, forgiveness, empathy, and self‐esteem were administered. Narratives were coded for themes of redemption (bad beginnings, positive endings) and exploration (engaging with the experience's emotional implications). After controlling for relevant covariates (e.g., story length), participants who formed redemptive stories of their partner's infidelity evinced higher levels of forgiveness and lower levels of empathy (Study 1), whereas participants who disclosed redemptive stories about their own infidelity demonstrated decreased forgiveness (Study 2). Across studies, exploratory narratives corresponded positively with conscientiousness.     

Narrating the other: Self-other agreement of affective qualities and manifest events among personal life stories and the vicarious life stories provided by informants

Life stories are psychosocial constructions of one’s past, present, and future. Vicarious stories are mental representations of others’ life stories. Across two studies, we examined self-other agreement among features of participants’ personal and vicarious stories and whether agreement corresponded with relationship closeness. Agreement was quantified via the affective qualities and manifest events of key scenes. Targets’ personal and informants’ vicarious stories demonstrated agreement in tone, but not in redemption or contamination (Study 1). The manifest events within informants’ vicarious scenes corresponded with participants’ personal life stories 25% of the time, and this agreement increased with greater relationship closeness (Study 2). Our findings support the notion that an understanding of the important events in someone’s life may facilitate interpersonal closeness.     

Humor Reconsidered: The Cultivation of “Accurate Perception” as a Contribution to the Care of Souls

Cultivating a sense of humor that has redemptive possibilities for the soul in a post-Christendom era is an important but nonetheless risky act of pastoral ministry. Humor, like the soul, involves ambiguity, incongruity and paradox. Insufficient appreciation of the paradoxical nature of humor contributes to views that are both overly suspicious as well as insufficiently cautious where humor is concerned. A redemptive sense of humor is explored as a virtue analogous to the Greek virtue of eutrapelia in tension with bomocholia (buffoonery/flippancy) and agroikia (boorishness/excessive seriousness). The work of Erik and Joan Erikson on the needed tension between the syntonic and dystonic further clarifies how humor best serves the soul. I conclude that the willingness to cultivate a sense of humor is an act of faith.     

“I just talk with my heart”: the mind–body problem,linguistic input,and the acquisition of folk psychological beliefs

This study adds to the literature addressing the input preschool children receive regarding mental state language by systematically investigating input that is metaphoric in nature. An analysis of the frequency of five body-part terms in adult speech and in storybooks directed to children reveals that the term heart is regularly used in figurative expressions to reflect a variety of emotions, both positive (e.g., love, kindness) and negative (e.g., hatred, sadness), especially in storybook text. Other salient body-part terms (i.e., brain, eye, foot, stomach) are used metaphorically much less frequently in speech or stories directed to preschoolers. The role of this input for children’s acquisition of mentalistic language and for their emerging theories of psychology and biology is discussed.     

Down on the upside: redemption,contamination, and agency in the lives of adult children of alcoholics

We investigated differences in the nature and implications of Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs; n?=?53) and non-ACOAs’ (n?=?80) narrative identities. Participants described six autobiographical narratives and completed measures of emotional functioning. Narratives were coded for redemptive (bad things turning good), contaminated (good things turning bad), and agentic (perceived control) imagery. ACOAs exhibited similar levels of redemptive and contaminated imagery, and lower levels of agency in their narratives, relative to non-ACOAs. In addition, themes of redemption, contamination, and agency corresponded divergently with emotional functioning. Among ACOAs, narrative redemption and agency were related to poorer emotional functioning whereas, among non-ACOAs, narrative contamination predicted poorer emotional functioning. These findings provide indication of the manner in which ACOAs story their lives. They also align with the emerging area of research noting that, among certain vulnerable populations, redemptive and agentic imagery serve as predictors of maladaptive functioning.     

The undesired: on nudniks in Jewish American fiction

This essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the nudnik appears in many stories throughout the years, from Sholem Aleichem’s, through Franz Kafka’s, to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and novels – nowhere was he more prominent than in post–World War II Jewish American fiction, more specifically in the short stories and novels of Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Both Roth and Malamud depict the nudnik as an embodiment of a generational divide, between the tormented Americanized young and the tormenting “Ostjuden” old. And yet, while Malamud’s nudniks serve as a critique on the fate of Jewish culture and tradition in post-Holocaust America, Roth identifies the character of the nudnik as a contaminating element that will forever haunt the younger individual. By discussing the Yiddish term “nudnik” and its ambivalent and unsettling nature in these writers’ texts, this essay will highlight the cultural impact on modern Jewish identity of the nudnik within each story.     

The anxious believer: Macaulay’s prescient theodicy

Recent feminists have critiqued G.W. Leibniz’s Theodicy for its effort to justify God’s role in undeserved human suffering over natural and moral evil. These critiques suggest that theodicies which focus on evil as suffering alone obfuscate how to thematize evil, and so they conclude that theodicies should be rejected and replaced with a secularized notion of evil that is inextricably tied to the experiences of the victim. This paper argues that the political philosophy found in the writings of Catherine Macaulay (1731–1791) can serve as a support to Leibniz’s larger claims and can also offer a more concrete, situated notion of evil that escapes the contemporary feminist critique. Macaulay’s work on natural and moral political evil, especially, will be presented as an early modern precursor to feminism, which defends divine perfection and a pre-established harmony in the face of political evil. I then identify three unique theodicical arguments in Macaulay’s work: the pragmatically beneficial defense, the eschatalogical defense, and the redemptive defense.     

Employing emotions to drive plot generation in a computer-based storyteller

Emotions are an integral part of the creative process; however, it is hard to find computer models of creativity where emotions play a fundamental role. This paper describes a computer model for plot generation based on emotions and tensions between characters. In particular, the document illustrates how emotions are employed to progress a story in a coherent way and generate novel situations, and how the dramatic tension of the story in progress can be employed to evaluate its interestingness. The model is implemented in a computer program named MEXICA [Pérez y Pérez, R., & Sharples, M. (2001). MEXICA: a computer model of a cognitive account of creative writing. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 13(2), 119–139]; this work concentrates on the role of emotions in plot generation. The main claim is that a story can be represented as a cluster or group of emotional links and tensions between characters that progresses over story-time; story-actions work as operators that modify such clusters. I present results showing how story generation is affected by various model parameters. This approach means the program is flexible, as it avoids using predefined story-structures or characters’ goals to drive story generation. Furthermore, evaluation of computer generated stories showed that MEXICA’s stories were most often selected as the best story. This suggests that the story-generation mechanisms within MEXICA are sufficiently rich to generate interesting and novel stories.     

Redemptive Prose: Richard Wright’s Re-authoring of the Patricidal Urtext

The pen is mightier than the sword! This adage, written by English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is a concise declaration that calls attention to the potency of the written word. By no means the exclusive preserve of the political revolutionary (e.g., Marx and Engel’s Manifesto of the Communist Party) nor of the theological reformer (e.g., Luther’s The Ninety-Five Theses), the mighty pen is also an instrument used by persons who seek either to effect or to experience a change in a number of diverse, and sometimes more personal, issues. As readers, we often ignore that many authors may be working through their own turmoil—whether psychological, spiritual, or otherwise—when they clasp the pen to put their thoughts to paper. How, then, do authors use the pen as a therapeutic tool to remedy their inner wounds, the unseen trauma often caused by various “psychosocial swords”? This article offers a particularized response to this inquiry by investigating the pain of paternal abandonment and the restorative efficacy of filial wisdom evinced in Richard Wright’s novels Black Boy and The Long Dream. It is my contention that Wright’s redemptive prose presents convincing evidence that the pen, as an instrument of restoration, is indeed mightier than any sword used to sever those inalienable relationships (e.g., the father-son dyad) that give sustenance to and are therefore an essential part of one’s selfhood.     

Neurodevelopmental consequences of pediatric cancer and its treatment: applying an early adversity framework to understanding cognitive,behavioral, and emotional outcomes

Today, children are surviving pediatric cancer at unprecedented rates, making it one of modern medicine’s true success stories. However, we are increasingly becoming aware of several deleterious effects of cancer and the subsequent “cure” that extend beyond physical sequelae. Indeed, survivors of childhood cancer commonly report cognitive, emotional, and psychological difficulties, including attentional difficulties, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Cognitive late- and long-term effects have been largely attributed to neurotoxic effects of cancer treatments (e.g., chemotherapy, cranial irradiation, surgery) on brain development. The role of childhood adversity in pediatric cancer – namely, the presence of a life-threatening disease and endurance of invasive medical procedures – has been largely ignored in the existing neuroscientific literature, despite compelling research by our group and others showing that exposure to more commonly studied adverse childhood experiences (i.e., domestic and community violence, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse) strongly imprints on neural development. While these adverse childhood experiences are different in many ways from the experience of childhood cancer (e.g., context, nature, source), they do share a common element of exposure to threat (i.e., threat to life or physical integrity). Therefore, we argue that the double hit of early threat and cancer treatments likely alters neural development, and ultimately, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional outcomes. In this paper, we (1) review the existing neuroimaging research on child, adolescent, and adult survivors of childhood cancer, (2) summarize gaps in our current understanding, (3) propose a novel neurobiological framework that characterizes childhood cancer as a type of childhood adversity, particularly a form of early threat, focusing on development of the hippocampus and the salience and emotion network (SEN), and (4) outline future directions for research.     

青少年负性情绪事件性质判断偏向的情绪弹性和性别效应

研究以青少年学生为被试,采用测验和实验的方法考察了情绪弹性和性别变量对青少年在四类负性情绪事件性质的判断偏向上可能产生的影响。结果表明：（1）情绪弹性对青少年加工负性情绪事件信息时的判断偏向产生一定影响,低情绪弹性个体在面对与一般生活情境相关的负性情绪事件时,更倾向于从消极方面对事件的性质加以判断。（2）性别对青少年加工负性情绪事件信息时的判断偏向不产生实质性影响。     

Retrospective reflexivity: The residual and subliminal repercussions of researching war

Stories of the war have been a known part of my story as granddaughter of Polish post-war migrants. Yet venturing into these stories as researcher has been troubling; I found their closeness and their raw emotion difficult to process. Significant sections of my interview schedules entailed participants recounting their own, their parents' or their grandparents' stories of war and migration, with traumatic episodes frequently intersecting into their stories. As a researcher, these traumatic narratives have had a residual quality, lasting in my subconscious long after the interviews themselves and doctorate for which they were conducted had finished.In this paper, I focus on experiences of, and reactions to listening to, analysing and writing about these traumatic cultural memories. Collins (1998: 3.35) has observed that ‘the emotions experienced, whether by the interviewer or interviewee, are as real, as important and as interesting as any other product of the interview’; my powerfully felt experiences with traumatic content have validated this sentiment. With a retrospective reflexivity I now realise that these cultural memories were not the only ‘product’ of my research, but that how they were narrated and how I dealt with them were also a significant part of the research process, and indeed stories in themselves. Here I attempt to retell how these stories impacted me as the researcher; how in the case of particularly harrowing stories, I also needed time to absorb the narratives, to comprehend the participant's experiences and their ability to narrate such stories, and to recover from the experience of listening to such accounts.     

Eschatological Images of Prophet and Priest in Edward Schillebeeckx's Theology of suffering for Others

Eschatological images of Jesus as found in Jewish and Christian texts constitute the foundation of Edward Schillebeeckx’s positive orientation to suffering for others. Jewish prototypes provided the early Christians with an understanding of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection as the advent of the eschaton. The pre‐existing biblical figures, which early Jewish Christians appropriated in the aftermath of the devastating crucifixion, provided traditional categories through which the life and death of Jesus could be meaningfully interpreted. Jesus as the eschatological prophet‐martyr and Jesus as the suffering, eschatological high priest of the Epistle to the Hebrews are the most prominent and complex of the ancient figures. In Schillebeeckx’s analysis, each of the two composite titles ascribed to Jesus is an amplification of a prophetic or priestly prototype. The use of both models is predicted on Jesus’ compassionate and redemptive response to suffering – healing the sick, comforting the bereaved, giving hope to the oppressed, and proclaiming eschatological salvation. Schillebeeckx’s historical‐critical investigation of Jesus’ perception of his anticipated death, as revealed in the Last supper narrative, and his analysis of the meaning ascribed to the crucifixion in primitive Christianity establish the basis for a theology of redemptive suffering in the early church. Schillebeeckx has critically examined three pre‐New Testament interpretations applied to Jesus’ crucifixion: (1) the death of the eschatological prophet‐martyr in the Deuteronomic tradition of the prophets whose proclamations were typically misjudged by Israel; (2) the fulfilment of the divine scheme of salvation through the suffering of the ‘righteous one’, who is ultimately exonerated by God; and (3) a vicarious, atoning sacrifice (the Jewish prototype that later influenced Anselm’s substitution theory). The interpretative categories examined by Schillebeeckx with respect to the crucifixion are closely related to the biblical images upon which his theology of suffering is based.     

We are one: Grief,weeping, and other deep emotions in response to nature as a path toward wholeness

Abstract

Using his own experience of grief in nature as a starting point, the researcher conducted an intuitive inquiry (Anderson, 2004) into experiences of grief, weeping, and other deep emotions in response to the natural world. Written stories of 40 people, told in the style of embodied writing (Anderson, 2001), were gathered and studied. The primary interpretation framed by the researcher was that experiences of grief, weeping, and other deep emotions in response to nature represent moments in a process of psycho‐spiritual transformation capable of healing the splits between mind and body, and between humanity and nature, that are prevalent in contemporary industrial and post‐industrial societies. Additional interpretations, focusing on the role of the body and embodiment, grief and weeping, and nature and spirituality, are offered. Interpretations are fleshed out with excerpts from participants’ stories.     

The Technological Factor: Redemption, Nature, and the Image of God

This paper begins from the premise that being in the image of God refers humanity neither to nature nor to its technology but to God. Two positions are thereby rejected: (1) that nature should be treated as a source of salvation (Heidegger), and (2) that redemptive significance may be ascribed to technology (Cole-Turner, Hefner). Instead, theological judgments concerning technologyrequire the reconstruction of theological anthropology. To this end, the image of God ( imago dei ) is reconceived in terms of sociality , temporality , and spatiality to show how humanity may be understood as imaging God in a technological society.     

“There is Nothing Good About this Work:” Identity and Unhappiness Among Nicaraguan Female Sex Workers

In a study of life satisfaction in Nicaragua, Cox (2012) found that female sex workers had dramatically low subjective well-being (SWB) relative to other marginalized groups in Nicaragua. Moreover, the SWB of these female sex workers was possibly the lowest recorded in the life satisfaction literature. A novel theory linking life satisfaction with life stories is proposed, and a method not heretofore used in SWB research is employed, the life story interview, in order to better understand the dramatic unhappiness of this sample. Seeing life satisfaction as an identity invoking process, the sample’s dramatically low life satisfaction judgments are framed within the larger context of narrative identity. Thematic analysis of the stories revealed a prototypical narrative arc: early family conflict, departure from home, a series of unsuccessful romantic relationships, birth of multiple children, dire economic crises, entry into sex work, and hope for a future exit from sex work. The life stories of these participants provided an identity and life course context to understand the dramatic unhappiness of this sample.