Embedding Work Values in Stories

A story about “A Typical Day in Your Future Worklife” was given to 1,037 high school students who were asked to rate its appeal. Differing work values had been embedded systematically to create 16 versions of the story. Higher pay and supportive supervisor feedback made a job more attractive on the average, but reactions varied by sex and ethnicity. Embedding work values in realistic occupational narratives may provide a more meaningful way of stimulating clients to explore the impact of alternative occupations on their future lives.     

Tales of the Absent Father: Applying the “Story” Metaphor in Family Therapy

Father-absent families often function with a lively father-presence conveyed by stories the family members share. The metaphor of “story” proposed by social constructionist and narrative approaches to therapy helps us to conceptualize the role these family stories play. The story metaphor draws attention to four issues: the rendition of what is said and unsaid about the father; the connections among past, present, and future ideas about father and family; the reciprocal influences of expression and experience, seen in the family's stories and interactions; and the impact on the family and the therapeutic process of dominant narratives about father-absence. Exploration of these issues demonstrates how client and therapist stories about the absent father mediate the impact of father-absence on the family.     

Iconic Prosody in Story Reading

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed (e.g., a fast drive, slow career progress) and size (e.g., a small grasshopper, an important contract). Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size‐related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech.     

The Role of Typical and Atypical Events in Story Memory

To understand how viewers or readers process and remember media narratives such as entertainment, news, and information is critical to our understanding of the mental processing of television and other media. Media stories contain both typical and atypical events and people, but little is known about how readers or viewers process and remember these two types of information. Participants in 2 experiments remembered atypical story items much better even a week later. However, the conservative way they treated atypical memories could give the illusion that typical items are better remembered than they really are. The results have implications for both mass media theory and theories of memory.     

Helping behaviour among people who use drugs: Altruism and mutual aid in a harm reduction program

People who use drugs, and particularly people experiencing addiction, are rarely afforded the opportunity to have their voices heard when it comes to drug treatment or drug policy or even when attempting to define themselves and their life experiences. Of course, there is much more to a person than one area of their behaviour. The current study seeks to capture and understand the lived experiences of people who use drugs, with a focus on their relationships and helping behaviour. We interviewed 32 participants in a harm reduction program seeking to provide understanding beyond stigmatizing and criminalizing drug narratives, by exploring their motivation and context for helping behaviours. Grounded theory methodology was used to understand the patterns of helping behaviour, along with the contexts in which help is or is not given. We particularly focus on participants' distribution of syringes and carrying medicine to reverse overdose (naloxone). Participants shared stories of altruism and mutual aid, along with barriers and disincentives to helping others. We situate these behaviours within contrasting environments of a free harm reduction program and the competitive market system of the U.S. society. Implications for practice and public policy are discussed.     

Young people’s perceptions of fat counsellors: “How can THAT help me?”

ABSTRACT

Being fat is widely recognised as a stigmatised identity which disproportionately impacts women, both personally and professionally. Women are numerically dominant as therapy practitioners, and we use this group to explore the ways a “fat counsellor” is imagined in the context of counselling. A qualitative story completion task, about a woman starting therapy, was presented to 203 British young people ages 15–24. Participants were 75% female, 88% white, 93% heterosexual, and 98% able-bodied. The story stem did not specify the sex of the counsellor, who was identified as fat; the vast majority of stories assumed the counsellor was female. Overall, fatness was perceived as negatively affecting therapy and the counsellor’s professional credibility because fatness was equated with a lack of psychological health, which rendered fat counsellors professionally “unfit.” This finding extends the literature on “weight bias” in professional settings and has implications for counsellors of all body sizes.     

An evaluation of story grammars

We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach.     

Individuality of Narratives Generated by Individuals: An Investigation Using Four-Panel Comics

In this study, we conducted an empirical research focusing on the generation of stories to obtain a hypothesis on how different the stories that people generate in their daily lives by linking events and situations are. For this purpose, five illustrations that revealed only the first and fourth panels of a four-panel comic were used as stimuli to generate a narrative in which the participants could make a connection between them. A total of 40 stories were obtained from eight participants. As a result, the narrative emerged in a variety of ways, even in events with little personal connection to the participants. This reveals that there are individual differences in the way people generate narratives themselves, despite their relationship with and position on the event. When the stories were typified, none of the participants generated similar stories in all five illustrations. This suggests that, because the combination of stories a person creates about every event is unique, there is only one story about the world, and one about himself/herself.     

Co-Authoring “We-ness” and Stories of Intimacy

Drawing from narrative ideas and practices, we consider how individuals, couples, and couples with therapists co-author and co-edit stories of “we-ness,” a kind of relational consciousness, and intimacy in the context of research interviews. Adapting the “small story” narrative approach of Michael Bamberg, and recognizing researcher reflexivity, we present details from two separate studies into: (1) how cohabitating couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” in and beyond a research interview; and (2) how young married couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” by describing how they made significant decisions together through difficult yet successful conversations. Inviting such stories of “we-ness” can talk this intimacy into being. We relate the processes and outcomes of these studies to using a narrative approach to help individuals and couples with concerns about intimacy within the context of therapy.     

Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space–Time Mappings

Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., “I'm looking forward to the weekend”). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space. However, almost nothing is known about the development of metaphorical gestures for time, despite keen interest in the origins of space–time metaphors. In this study, we examined the gestures that English‐speaking 6‐to‐7‐year‐olds, 9‐to‐11‐year‐olds, 13‐to‐15‐year‐olds, and adults produced when talking about time. Participants were asked to explain the difference between pairs of temporal adverbs (e.g., “tomorrow” versus “yesterday”) and to use their hands while doing so. There was a gradual increase across age groups in the propensity to produce spatial metaphorical gestures when talking about time. However, even a substantial majority of 6‐to‐7‐year‐old children produced a spatial gesture on at least one occasion. Overall, participants produced fewer gestures in the sagittal (front‐back) axis than in the lateral (left‐right) axis, and this was particularly true for the youngest children and adolescents. Gestures that were incongruent with the prevailing norms of space–time mappings among English speakers (leftward and backward for past; rightward and forward for future) gradually decreased with increasing age. This was true for both the lateral and sagittal axis. This study highlights the importance of metaphoricity in children's understanding of time. It also suggests that, by 6 to 7 years of age, culturally determined representations of time have a strong influence on children's spatial metaphorical gestures.     

The Impact of Distributive Systems and Gender on Perceptions of Social Relations1

A total of 120 male and female students were assigned to one of three distributive systems. After completing four tasks, subjects wcre shown a picture of a group and asked to write a story about the people and events in the picture. Judges then rated the stories on four dimensions of social relations. The written responses of individuals working under variable bonus systems were rated significantly more “competitive,”“task-oriented,”“formal,” and “unequal (in power)” than those of subjects assigned to a flat-rate system. Stories written by males were significantly more competitive than those of females.     

Innovation Through Tradition: Rediscovering the “Humanist” in the Medical Humanities

Throughout its fifty-year history, the role of the medical humanist and even the name “medical humanities” has remained raw, dynamic and contested. What do we mean when we call ourselves “humanists” and our practice “medical humanities?” To address these questions, we turn to the concept of origin narratives. After explaining the value of these stories, we focus on one particularly rich origin narrative of the medical humanities by telling the story of how a group of educators, ethicists, and scholars struggling to define their relatively new field rediscovered the studia humanitatis, a Renaissance curriculum for learning and teaching. Our origin narrative is composed of two intertwined stories—the history of the studia humanitatis itself and the story of the scholars who rediscovered it. We argue that as an origin narrative the studia humanitatis grounds the medical humanities as both an engaged moral practice and pedagogical project. In the latter part of the paper, we use this origin narrative to show how medical humanists working in translational science can use their understanding of their historical roots to do meaningful work in the world.     

Connecting the dots between fantasy and reality: The social psychology of our engagement with fictional narrative and its functional value

This essay provides an overview of research and theory on narrative and its important, functional role in human experience, including the ways people use media to interrogate their own beliefs and feelings, and derive social meaning. Thought‐provoking film, television, and books can help us make meaning of our lives and grow in ways that are important for our successful social functioning. Research reviewed here demonstrates that exposure to fiction can increase empathy and social skills and reduce prejudice. Our connection to characters and stories has been studied in various ways as extensions of the self into another, while at the same time bringing the other into the self. Bringing together disparate perspectives, we propose that connecting to story worlds involves a process of “dual empathy”—simultaneously engaging in intense personal processing while also “feeling through” characters, both of which produce benefits. Because the value of entertainment narratives may not always be well understood, we explain how those experiences can be personal, social, and can serve important adaptive functions.     

High‐Stakes Decision‐Making Within Complex Social Environments: A Computational Model of Belief Systems in the Arab Spring

People experiencing similar conditions may make different decisions, and their belief systems provide insight about these differences. An example of high‐stakes decision‐making within a complex social context is the Arab Spring, in which large numbers of people decided to protest and even larger numbers decided to stay at home. This study uses qualitative analyses of interview narratives and social media addressing individual decisions to develop a computational model tracing the cognitive decision‐making process. The model builds on work by Abelson and Carroll (1965), Schank and Abelson (1977), and Axelrod (1976) to systematically trace the inferences connecting beliefs to decisions. The findings show that protest decisions were often based on positive emotions such as pride, hope, courage, and solidarity, triggered by beliefs about successful protest and self‐sacrifice. By contrast, decisions to stay at home were triggered by beliefs about safety, state approval, and living conditions. As one participant said, “When I heard about the revolution in Tunisia, my heart was filled with solidarity for the people.” In the words of a non‐participant: “When people are killed, we must be careful. There are more important things than protest: safety and stability.” This study of individual explanations about events identifies the role of emotions in high‐stakes decision‐making within complex social environments.     

The Effects of Relationship Closeness on the Communication of Stereotype-Relevant Information in Conversation

刻板印象信息常借助人际关系链得以沟通和传递。而沟通是一种社会情境活动,故人们对信息的沟通和传递依赖于沟通的社会背景,关系亲密度是其中的一个重要因素。关系亲密度指的是沟通者间相互依赖和了解的程度,以自我包含他人量表得分作为判断指标。本研究的目的即为扩展已有的刻板印象沟通研究,采用Ruscher等人提出的二人对话范式,通过两个实验探索关系亲密度如何影响人们在谈话过程中对刻板印象相关信息的沟通和传递。实验1中的关系亲密度由自然存在模式建构,共32对同性别被试参与;实验2中的关系亲密度由RCIT三阶段自我表露任务实验室诱发模式建构,共38对同性别被试参与。所用的沟通材料均为Klein 等 人编制的刻板印象信息故事,并使用自我包含他人量表检核关系亲密度。实验均为2×2×2三因素混合设计,其中,关系亲密度（陌生人和朋友）为被试间因素,刻板印象信息的一致性（SC一致信息与SI不一致信息）和故事情节的核心性（核心和次要）为被试内因素。在实验1中,三因素方差分析的结果显示,刻板印象信息的一致性主效应显著,核心性主效应显著,刻板印象信息的一致性和关系亲密度的交互作用显著。在陌生人关系条件下,被试传递的 SC 信息显著多于 SI 信息;而在朋友关系条件下,被试并没有显示出这种SC偏差,反而传递了稍多的SI信息。在实验2中,三因素方差分析的结果显示,刻板印象信息的一致性主效应边缘显著,核心性主效应显著,刻板印象信息的一致性和关系亲密度的交互作用显著。在陌生人关系条件下,被试传递的SC信息显著多于 SI 信息;而在朋友关系条件下,被试并没有显示出SC偏差,同样传递了稍多的SI信息。因此,可以认为人们倾向于向陌生人传递显著更多的刻板印象一致信息,而向朋友则未显示出这种特点。谈话中,关系亲密度影响刻板印象信息的沟通和传递。     

Abstracting and extracting: Causal coherence and the development of the life story

This study compared life story memories of emerging adults and early adolescents to other autobiographical memories. Participants described three scenes of their respective life stories, a high point, low point, and turning point narrative, and described the connections between them in a fourth narrative. Participants also related four autobiographical narratives from corresponding time periods for comparison. Narratives were analysed for two measures of causal coherence, narrative complexity and meaning making, and for thematic coherence. Life story narratives contained more self-related lessons and insights and greater recognition of complexity than non-life-story narratives, but these differences were confined to narratives of turning points and connections between events. Thematic connections between narratives were more abstract and self-related in life story narratives. Emerging adults' narratives, when compared to those of early adolescents, showed more evidence of self-related abstract thinking and recognition of multiple dimensions. Findings indicate consistent ways in which life story memories differ from other autobiographic memories, and show evidence of development in adolescence.     

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.     

Character mediation of story generation via protagonist insertion

The current study set out to examine how the presence or absence of depicted characters in visual narratives influences the degree of character-related content in improvised stories. The experiment consisted of trials of oral storytelling that were prompted by wordless comics. The degree of character content in the storylines was varied from being character-based—showing people engaging in social interactions—to being characterless, for example scenes depicting natural phenomena. An intermediate “character-implied” condition was also investigated, exemplified by the scene of a tornado passing through a town, where no people were depicted but in which their presence was strongly suggested. Linguistic content analysis of 472 stories demonstrated indistinguishable use of third-person pronouns (she/he) between character-implied and character-containing scenarios. An analysis of character presence demonstrated that storytellers inserted protagonists into the character-implied stories as vehicles for the actions taking place. This phenomenon reveals the character-driven nature of story creation.