Collaborative narration of the past and extraversion

We propose that collaborative narration is a process in which narrative identity develops, and we examine individual differences in extraversion in such narration. Two studies are presented: retrospective and experience sampling episodes of collaborative narration, the first with self-defining memories, the second with everyday narration. Across both studies, extraversion was associated with an increased frequency in collaborative narration. This finding was not explained by the ‘talkativeness’ item in the extraversion measures. Further, more extraverted people shared their self-defining memories with more people and were more comfortable sharing than less extraverted people, the impact of extraversion was specific to mutual reminiscence in everyday narration, and mutual reminiscence was more enjoyable for those who are more extraverted than introverted. Implications from these data for understanding individual differences in identity and narrative development are discussed.     

Reading the Lucan call of the first disciples differently: the voices of sensing and intuition

Abstract

This article argues that discipleship is a notion of growing importance to the Christian denominations and that the Marcan narrative of the call of the first disciples has been of particular importance in giving shape to this notion. The Lucan narrative of the call of the first disciple, involving the great catch of fish, is problematic in two ways, concerning its relationship with the Marcan understanding of call and also with the Johannine post-resurrection narrative. Against this background this article reports on an empirical study, drawing on the reader perspective and on the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics, that illuminates the distinctive voices of sensing types and intuitive types reading Luke 5: 1–7.     

The Spirit(s) of Science: Paradoxical Positivism as Religious Discourse among Spiritualists

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.     

The State of the Story in Personality Psychology

Personality psychologists have been studying narratives for decades. Their work offers significant insights into the meaning of the stories people tell. This article highlights some historical antecedents as well as the latest research findings from the growing area of personality psychology that focuses on narrative approaches. First, narrative research in personality shows that imaginative stories reveal enduring implicit motivations linked to affect, thought, and behavior. Second, autobiographical stories play a significant role in self‐development and personal identity formation. The narration of one's story is a process influenced over the life span by age‐related capacities and various psychological needs that occur in social and cultural contexts.     

Genetic Counseling,Professional Values,and Habitus: An Analysis of Disability Narratives in Textbooks

This article analyzes narrative illustrations in genetic counseling textbooks as a way of understanding professional habitus--the dispositions that motivate professional behavior. In particular, this analysis shows that there are significant differences in how the textbooks' expository and narrative portions represent Down syndrome, genetic counseling practice, and patient behaviors. While the narrative portions of the text position the genetic counseling profession as working in service to the values of genetic medicine, the expository portions represent genetic counselors as neutral parties. Ultimately, this article argues that this ambiguity is harmful to the production of a professional habitus that is consistent with espoused professional values concerning respect for persons with disabilities and the promotion of psychosocial counseling.     

THE QUEST FOR SELF-IDENTITY: TIME,NARRATIVE, AND THE LATE PROSE OF SAMUEL BECKETT

The long-standing problem of understanding self-identity has been most recently addressed as a matter of narrative form. Paul Ricoeur (1985a), as well as others, has examined how the discordant experience of time is structured by narrative form and can constitute an identity. This article attempts to extend his analysis to a reading of the late prose work of Samuel Beckett. While Beckett's approach to narrative identity shares similarity with Ricoeur's analysis, there are important distinctions. In contrast to Ricoeur's emphasis on the way narrative can order temporal experience, an examination of the works Stories and Texts for Nothing (1967) and How It Is (1964) serve to illustrate Beckett's experimentation with the generative power of the narrative voice. For Beckett, it seems that the very act of narration through time can give rise to problematic ambiguity and semantic multiplicity. It is argued that the literary works of Beckett complement that of Ricoeur's by attacking order and meaning; his texts show how narrating in time can distend, pull, and fragment in unexpected and generative ways. It is suggested that an appreciation of both the affirmative and negative aspects of narration are necessary for a complete understanding of self-identity.     

Unveiling the reasoning processes of robots through introspective dialogues in a storytelling system: A study on the elicited empathy

The work studies the empathy elicited by a storytelling system in which the characters in the story are interpreted by humanoid robots and modelled as cognitive agents. The ACT-R architecture is exploited to shape the characters’ personalities and equip them with knowledge and behaviours typical of social practices. The narration is enriched with gestures and emotional expressions obtained by setting parameters that can be correlated to some emotions, such as the pitch and speech rate, the LEDs colour and the head inclination. The system has been evaluated by comparing a simple narrative modality with an enhanced one, where an introspective dialogue is adopted to explain and let transparent the internal reasoning processes of the characters. The obtained results show that storytelling affected the cognitive component of empathy, especially through the advanced narrative mode.     

Autobiographical Narratives of Oldest-Old Persons: What Matters at That Age?

This study adopts the Valuation theory and the Self-Confrontation Method to explore the autobiographic narrative in oldest old persons, considering a temporal perspective (past, present, future). The sample comprises three men and two women (84-95 years old). The findings suggest that the narrative of oldest-old persons emerges structured in a way that their narration of the past focus on outside connections (proximity with others; success achieved); their narration of the present centers on attaining a life philosophy and proximity with others and their narration of the future concentrates on self-enhancement (maintaining autonomy vs. experiencing powerlessness and lack of involvement).     

Cancer Knowledge in the Plural: Queering the Biopolitics of Narrative and Affective Mobilities

In this age of DIY Health—a present that has been described as a time of “ludic capitalism”—one is constantly confronted with the injunction to manage risk by means of making healthy choices and of informed participation in various self-surveillant technologies of bioinformatics. Neoliberal governmentality has been redacted by poststructuralist scholars of bioethics as defined by the two-fold emergence of, on the one hand, populations and on the other, the self-determining individual—as biopolitical entities. In this article, we provide a genealogical-phenomenological schematization (GPS analysis) of the narration of cancer in relation to “sexual minority populations.” Canonical discourses concerning minority sexualities are articulated by means of a logic of “inclusion and reification” that organizes the interiorization of norms of embodied relationality, and a positive liaison with biomedical technologies and techniques in the taking up of a rhetorical style of biographical compliance. Neoliberal DIY Health logics conflate participation with agency, and institute norms of recognition that constrain visibility to: citizens who make healthy choices and manage risk, heroic cancer stories, stories of the reconstruction of states of normalcy, or of survival against all odds. Alternatively, we trace the performative articulations of queer narrative practices that constitute an ephemeral, nomadic praxiology—a doing of knowledge in cancer’s queer narration. Queer cancer narrative practices represent a relationship to health and embodiment that is predicated, not on normalcy, but predicated on troubling norms, on artful failure, and on engaging in a kind of affective mapping that might be thought constitutive of a speculative bioethical relation to the self as other.     

Narrative Process Coding System in Marital and Family Therapy: An Intensive Case Analysis of the Formation of a Therapeutic System

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the method (Narrative Processes Coding System) for studying the narrative sequences of individual psychotherapy developed by Angus and Hardtke (1994) can be applied in a family therapeutic process. According to the results narrative process coding system adds new dimensions and gives new depth in the narrative understanding of family therapeutic process. In micro-analytic interactional level it shows the complicated interactions between narration, plot, and narrative process type.     

The unsaid in the psychotherapy narrative: Voicing the unvoiced

In research interviews, psychotherapy clients, from different therapeutic approaches, identified silent moments entailing processes that facilitated their therapeutic progress. A grounded theory method was used to analyse these interviews resulting in three categories of productive pauses: emotional, expressive and reflective pauses. This study examines these categories in relation to their narrative context, and, more broadly, to narrative theory. It highlights what remains unsaid in the psychotherapy narrative, describes these silent processes that transform narration into a therapeutic experience and reframes the therapeutic narrative as a method for structuring introspective silences.     

Whole Lives and Good Deaths

This article discusses two views associated with narrative conceptions of the self. The first view asserts that our whole life is reasonably regarded as a single unit of meaning. A prominent strand of the philosophical narrative account of the self is the representative of this view. The second view—which has currency beyond the confines of the philosophical narrative account—is that the meaning of a life story is dependent on what happens at the end of it. The article argues that the connection between these two views is more tentative than often supposed: philosophical narrativists that see life as a single unit of value and meaning nonetheless provide grounds for arguing that the end of life is not the best and may be a particularly bad time to approach and intervene in the matter of how well one's life as a whole has gone.     

A Dramatic Approach to the Self-Concept: Intelligibility and the Second Person

Human Studies - Recent works on narrative self-concept still do not pay enough attention to how a person’s actions influence her narration. Narrative structures may enable the subject to give...     

Altars for the Morrigan: the legitimizing agency of a goddess in the networked flow of authority of a YouTube sub-culture

ABSTRACT

The Pagan YouTube e-community is an informal, amorphous collectivity within which small sub-cultures evolve around more specific common practices, such as worship of a deity. One such sub-culture is that of altar-creation for the Irish goddess the Morrigan and the mediation of these altars through the recording and uploading of videos on YouTube. A clear culture and consistent aesthetic can be observed in the analysis of the altars mediated in this sub-culture. This article examines the operating authorities that can be traced across its development. Evidence for the networked nature of the group’s social formation—along with the aesthetically conservative nature of the culture evident therein—suggests that the authority structure of the e-community is networked and thus ‘horizontal’: a co-creation of the individuals within the collective. However, the formative influence of a prominent individual demonstrates a ‘vertical’ influence. This article thus argues that an axial horizontal–vertical theoretical model of authority most accurately describes the dynamics of this e-community. Ultimately, it is the implied authority of the Morrigan herself that mediates the flows of authority. It is due to the devotees’ understanding of the Morrigan as the legitimating force that the vertical influences are denied or deflected through a discourse of individualism.     

The Aesthetic Collision: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Trinity and the Cross

The relationship envisioned by Hans Urs von Balthasar between the Trinity and the events of Christ's passion and death has elicited concern from various theologians that he has muddled the important distinction between God's eternal life ad intra and his interaction with the world through the economy of his actions. This article argues that such a reading of Balthasar's theology is ultimately a serious misconstrual of his work since it overlooks the aesthetic categories established early in The Glory of the Lord through which his narration of the cross‐event must ultimately be interpreted. By interpreting Balthasar in this manner, this article clarifies the content of what is perhaps Balthasar's most important theological contribution, and provides a creative alternative for how best to situate the relationship (oft‐discussed in twentieth‐century theology) between the Trinity and the crucifixion.     

Universal stories: How narratives satisfy core motives

Abstract

For millennia, narratives have been a primary mode of oral discourse. Narrative presentation of information has been shown to facilitate interpersonal and group communication. However, research indicates that narratives are more than merely an adaptive mode of communication. Narrative is a fundamental – and perhaps foundational – element of social and cultural life. The present article posits that the centrality of narrative in social life is due to narrative’s ability to help satisfy the five core social motives, as identified by Fiske belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust. In so doing, this article reviews empirical and theoretical work examining basic narrative processes, autobiographical narratives, and entertainment narrative consumption to illustrate how narrative thought helps to satisfies core human motives and in turn, how the narrative construction process informs self and identity formation.     

On the Road to Emmaus: Together towards Life as Conversation Partner in Missiological Research

This article argues that the Emmaus narrative in Luke 24:13‐40 illustrates a messianic paradigmatic missiological approach to costly discipleship making. The central motif in this approach is critical emancipatory conversation, which is not merely the means to data gathering but an end in itself. Using Luke's story as a paradigmatic approach to missiological research, I demonstrate how Together towards Life as a research tool could creatively and innovatively engage with African theological education.     

LETTING REALITY BECOME REAL: On Mystery and Reality in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics the notion of reality plays a central role. The present article focuses on the ethical implications of the Chalcedonian Christology underlying this concept. This approach is tied to the debate on the relationship between the universal and specific identity of Christian social ethics in public discourse. In the opening section the article outlines the pertinence of this debate with regard to Bonhoeffer's Christological ethic. In the following section the article analyzes Bonhoeffer's concept of reality and the implied Chalcedonian traits. With this foundation established the article raises the question about its social ethical implications. The final part of the article argues that Bonhoeffer's ethics and ecclesiology cannot be separated from each other, explaining why Bonhoeffer's notion of reality leads to an assertion of the church's role in letting reality become real. In the light of Bonhoeffer's notion of reality the last section argues for the reconciliation of Christian witness and participation in public discourse.     

Psychological Trauma,Christ’s Passion,and the African American Faith Tradition

This article argues that Christ’s passion/crucifixion functioned within the African American psyche as a religious narrative and symbol that uniquely addressed the severe trauma they underwent during the Middle Passage and slavery by enabling them to experience the presence of God in the depths of extreme suffering. Christ’s passion/crucifixion mirrored their experience of racial oppression and, thereby, provided a critique of the system and actors that perpetuated it. The Spiritual “Were You There?” is interpreted in this light. This correspondence between the African American’s historical experience and the narrative symbol of Christ’s passion/crucifixion helps explain their conversion to Christianity.