On Becoming Better Human Beings: Six Stories to Live By

What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand ??becoming better?? as a combined improvement process bringing persons ??up from?? a negative condition and ??up to?? a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the mastery of cognitive skills, neglecting the negative conditions that can make these skills mis-educative. I therefore tell six stories in the Western tradition about conditions for a combined improvement process. The first three stories belong to our cultural ABC: an Aristotelian story about moral wisdom which brings people up from being enslaved by passions and up to a good life of virtues; a Biblical story about God??s word bringing listeners up from a self-centred life and up into creative work as God??s fellow workers, and a short Cave story by Plato about liberation??up from living by common illusions and up to enlightenment from what is perfectly good. The subsequent three stories interpret and actualise these basic stories in different ways: a story about moral wisdom and divine love (Thomas Aquinas), a story about individual freedom and rationality (Immanuel Kant), and a story about the love that builds us up as equal human beings (S?ren Kierkegaard). These stories may directly guide us adults??and indirectly the children and youth who learn from our examples??when we struggle to become better human beings.     

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.     

Everything you wanted to know about redemptive stories* (*but were afraid to ask)

Life stories organize personal experiences within broad temporal frameworks. Stories that are redemptive in nature progress from negative beginnings to positive endings. Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the tendency for individuals to both understand their lives using story-based principles and evoke redemptive imagery while so doing. Here, I consider the past (foundations), present (extant literature), and future (directions and controversies) of psychology’s redemptive story. Previously, work on redemptive stories has been informed by several theoretical vantages and analytic approaches. Currently, a sizable literature has emerged examining redemptive stories in relation to a number of processes and outcomes. In future, it will be crucial to explore moderations in these relations as well as redemption’s causal nature.     

Effects of Concept Mapping on Creativity in Photo Stories

This research tested the use of concept map planning to support the development of creativity in photo stories, hypothesizing that skills taught to support organization would improve creativity. Concept maps are a type of graphic organizer, used to represent an ordering of ideas with nodes and linking words that form propositional statements. They were applied to story development under the assumption that the creative development of narrative elements requires organization. Undergraduate education students were randomly assigned to either concept map or text-based planning groups for the production of digital photo stories. Creativity was operationalized using dimensions of novelty, interest, clarity, and ability to be understood. A multivariate effect of planning method was found for these dimensions favoring the concept map group, due largely to greater clarity in the photo stories. Clarity in photo stories adds to their utility as creative products. This study represents first steps toward empirically assessing concept maps for a creative purpose, and further investigation, with a larger sample in an authentic context, over a longer period of planning time is recommended.     

Surrender to the Other: Meeting Annette Richard on the Historical,Personal, and Therapeutic Return from Exile

Annette Richard’s reflections on her complex developmental and therapeutic return from historical exile create resonances beyond the Acadian story to reach into the ethical significance of clinical work more generally. This discussion links Ghent’s distinction of masochism from surrender with Brandchaft’s liberation from pathological accommodation in reading Richard’s personal and clinical stories.     

The Joy of Suffering: Nietzsche,Theodicy and women’s bodies

Abstract

I use Nietzsche’s work on theodicy to explore gendered valuation systems around women’s bodies. The notion of theodicy provides a different entry point to questions of ideology as it begins with an account of people’s attempts to find meaning in their lives. Nietzsche traced humans’ propensity to look for and create stories that give meaning to their lives, even when this meaning is one that may ultimately oppress them or celebrate something negative such as suffering. For him it is not the suffering that torments humans, but rather its meaninglessness. In the slums of Northeast Brazil, Afro-Brazilian women invest in the Christian glorification of suffering in a context where they experience their bodies in terms of loss, shame and alienation. I explore how, through a process of creative deception, this suffering comes to be experienced as pleasure. That is, the women reconstruct their bodies using two dominant stories to which they have access: Christianity and the glamorous Brazilian soap operas.     

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.     

Orphan Sunday: Narratives of Salvation in Transnational Adoption

Abstract : The article is a critical analysis of public narratives about transnational adoption that equate adoption with the salvation of “orphans.” The stories I weave together from in‐depth interviews, social science and humanities research, law and policy, and public dialogues make visible the scaffolding of power that shapes families’ lives. I tell a specific story about Korean American adoption that speaks to the power inequalities shaping the transnational transfer of children from developing countries all over the world. These stories reframe the circumstances of adoptees’ births and relinquishments as issues of social inequality rather than as individual choice.     

Generality of creativity across performance domains

The existence of general creative‐thinking skills was investigated. In the first study, 50 eighth‐grade students wrote poems, stories, mathematical equations, and mathematical word problems, all of which were rated for creativity by experts. When the effects of IQ reading achievement, and math achievement were controlled through multiple regression analyses, creativity scores on the four tasks were not correlated. This suggests that general creative‐thinking skills did not contribute to creative performance in these different tasks. Subjects also responded to a brief verbal fluency test. Scores on this test correlated significantly with story‐writing creativity (r = .34) but not with the other three tasks. Three follow‐up studies were conducted with second‐, fourth‐, and fifth‐grade students, and adults. These studies also produced no significant correlations among creativity ratings of various products.     

The Language of Creativity: Evidence from Humans and Large Language Models

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes perceptual details, thus transporting the reader to another time and place, would be predictive of creativity. Additionally, we explore the use of generative language models to supplement human data collection and examine the extent to which machine-generated stories can mimic human creativity. We collect 600 short stories from human participants and GPT-3, subsequently randomized and assessed on their creative quality. Results indicate that the presence of perceptual details, in conjunction with semantic diversity, is highly predictive of creativity. These results were replicated in an independent sample of stories (n = 120) generated by GPT-4. We do not observe a significant difference between human and AI-generated stories in terms of creativity ratings, and we also observe positive correlations between human and AI assessments of creativity. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

A Storytelling Approach: Insights from the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Shambaa</Emphasis>

Narrative medicine explores the stories that patients tell; this paper, conversely, looks at some of the stories that patients are told. The paper starts by examining the ‘story’ told by the Shambaa people of Tanzania to explain the bubonic plague and contrasts this with the stories told by Ghanaian communities to explain lymphatic filariasis. By harnessing insights from memory studies, these stories’ memorability is claimed to be due to their use mnemonic devices woven into stories. The paper suggests that stories can be unpatronising, informative, and appropriate vehicles for communicating medical information to all age groups across all cultures.     

An Analytic Creativity Assessment Scale for Digital Game Story Design: Construct Validity,Internal Consistency and Interrater Reliability

Mobile technology has rapidly made digital games a popular entertainment to this digital generation, and thus digital game design received considerable attention in both the game industry and design education. Digital game design involves diverse dimensions in which digital game story design (DGSD) particularly attracts our interest, as the literature needs more information, especially the creativity assessment of DGSD. Existing measuring tools do not adequately address the characteristics of game-story duality. Thus, an analytic creativity assessment scale of DGSD (CAS-DGSD) based on literature and original ideas was developed in our previous work. This study aims to statistically examine its construct validity, internal consistency reliability, and interrater reliability to verify its effectiveness. Three commercial games of 3 different game genres (action, puzzle, and role-play) were rated by 32 student raters and 4 expert raters. Statistical results show acceptable construct validity, internal consistency reliability, and interrater reliability of the CAS-DGSD. The CAS-DGSD not only helps evaluators like teachers identify which aspects of DGSD are short of creativity, but also serves as a guideline for digital game story designers like design students and product developers to tailor creative and entertaining game stories.     

Stories as Gift: Patient Narratives and the Development of Empathy

Critical thought and assessment of medical, emotional, and social problems faced by patients is central to genetic counselor training and development. However, primary emphasis on these critical problem-solving approaches can interfere with the development of empathic listening skills. Using a narrative medicine approach, I describe how learning to reframe one patient’s story of healing as a gift allowed me to become a more open and empathic listener. Ultimately, the empathy and understanding that I learned from this patient’s narrative added to what previous patients had taught me and helped me assist other patients (and myself) in identifying and nurturing healing narratives for people coping with illness and grief. The approach presented here emphasizes the importance of recognizing patients as valuable teachers in the development of higher-level empathy skills.     

Storytellers and Scenario Spinners: Some Reflections on Religion and Science in Light of a Pragmatic, Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge

Asserting that both scientists and religious thinkers are involved in telling stories about the past and spinning scenarios about the future, I first compare and contrast the purposes of scientific and religious storytelling. Then, in light of some recent work on brain and language evolution, I offer a possible story about how humans might have become storytellers. Finally, I discuss how religious stories might be evaluated pragmatically and even scientifically by developing Lakatosian-type research programs.     

Tomorrow is the start of the rest of their life — so who cares about health? Exploring constructions of weight-loss motivations and health using story completion

ABSTRACT

In Western societies, health is closely associated with body weight and weight loss, achieved through individual health behaviour. I examined such associations in constructions of weight-loss motivations and health in stories generated using the novel method of story completion. The story stem featured either a female or male protagonist deciding to lose weight; 148 women and 22 men (ages 18–24) provided stories in response. A social constructionist thematic analysis identified five themes: health as clothing size and means to an end; weight-loss activity as good for every woman; tomorrow is going to be the start of the rest of their life; tell me when I’m okay — it’s not about wellbeing; and weight loss as signifier of the “true self.” Considering the adverse social and psychological consequences reflected in the stories and the longstanding elusiveness of successful weight-loss methods, I support calls to review the dominant weight-focused approach to public health.     

Richard Zaner’s “Troubled” Voice In <Emphasis Type="Italic">Troubled Voices</Emphasis>: Poseur,Posing, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Possibilizing</Emphasis>?

This essay considers Richard Zaner’s storytelling in Troubled Voices as a form of possibilizing which uses the stories to exemplify important moral themes such as contingency and freedom. Distinguishing between activities of moral discovery through the telling of a story and “posing” in the sense of writing to tell the “moral” of the story, I suggest that something crucial goes on for Zaner in his own tellings. Several of the more insistent implications Zaner reveals about the moral relationships encountered in the activity of clinical ethics consultation are examined in that light, especially regarding this question: is it more beneficial, or harmful, to articulate elements of core meanings and values that are entailed in individual viewpoints, which, prior to an ethics consultant’s participation, may have remained unspoken and possibly unacknowledged?     

Narrative skill in children with early unilateral brain injury: a possible limit to functional plasticity

Children with pre‐ or perinatal brain injury (PL) exhibit marked plasticity for language learning. Previous work has focused mostly on the emergence of earlier‐developing skills, such as vocabulary and syntax. Here we ask whether this plasticity for earlier‐developing aspects of language extends to more complex, later‐developing language functions by examining the narrative production of children with PL. Using an elicitation technique that involves asking children to create stories de novo in response to a story stem, we collected narratives from 11 children with PL and 20 typically developing (TD) children. Narratives were analysed for length, diversity of the vocabulary used, use of complex syntax, complexity of the macro‐level narrative structure and use of narrative evaluation. Children’s language performance on vocabulary and syntax tasks outside the narrative context was also measured. Findings show that children with PL produced shorter stories, used less diverse vocabulary, produced structurally less complex stories at the macro‐level, and made fewer inferences regarding the cognitive states of the story characters. These differences in the narrative task emerged even though children with PL did not differ from TD children on vocabulary and syntax tasks outside the narrative context. Thus, findings suggest that there may be limitations to the plasticity for language functions displayed by children with PL, and that these limitations may be most apparent in complex, decontextualized language tasks such as narrative production.     

“What If” Dimensions of the Analytic Field: Imagination,Object Vitality,and Psychic Growth

This paper considers the role of imagination in the context of Bionian Field Theory. Expanding on Hanna Segal’s idea of “what if” dimensions of the analytic process, it is argued that “what if” states engage evocative and vital aspects of objects. They set up particular tensions in the analytic field that trigger “imaginative work.” The processes at work share many similarities with the artist’s creative process. For this reason, William Kentridge’s reflections on his own creative process are used to elucidate “imaginative work” as an esthetic, creative and agentive process. Three case fragments are used to illustrate some of these ideas in the clinical setting.     

Novel associative processing and aging: effect on creative production

ABSTRACT

Creative production has been reported to decline with age. This study investigated age-related differences in creative verbal production. Participants were 30 younger and 30 older adults. Study testing included language and cognitive assessments and the experimental task wherein participants created short stories incorporating words that are not commonly related, semantically or associatively. The resulting stories were rated by independent blinded judges for originality, cohesion, appropriateness, and organization. Younger adults' stories were rated as being significantly more original and more appropriate. Integrating unrelated words to create original stories requires activating widely distributed lexical-semantic networks to develop novel associations. Potential decreased neural network connectivity due to white matter degradation, commonly seen in normal aging, as well as decrements in front-executive disengagement may have affected older adults' performance on this story creation task. Future research using neuroimaging may elucidate possible neuroanatomic correlates of age-related changes in associative creative production..     

Girls’ Stories About Their First Sexual Intercourse: Readiness,Affection and Experience-Seeking in the Process of Growing into Womanhood

This study introduces Finnish girls’ views on and explanations for the factors contributing to their decisions concerning their first sexual intercourse. The data consists of personal interviews with girls aged 16–19, and stories produced through process drama. The analysis was conducted by narrative methods. Two model story categories of the first sexual intercourse stories were constructed: the close relationship and the casual relationship. The close relationship category consists of elements of two sub-stories: the conventional and the planned love story. The casual relationship category consists of elements of the tragic love, the teenage party and the experience-seeking sub-stories. Being prepared for sex was a shared plot element in all of the first intercourse stories. In the close relationship category the other major explanatory factors were mutual love and a steady relationship. In the casual relationship category the explanatory factors were girl’s affection for the partner without a relationship or getting experience, respectively. The girls’ agency in the use of contraception and the intercourse itself differed between the sub-stories. Girls regarded intercourse as an important step towards their womanhood. Those who work with teenagers should be aware of these stories in order to reinforce those stories where teenagers are active agents.