Narratives at work: the development of career identity

Well-developed career stories are becoming increasingly important for individuals as they navigate an unstable and unpredictable labour market. Existing narrative approaches in career guidance do not yet clearly identify the learning process by which career stories are created. In this article, a model of transformation-through-writing will be introduced to help explain the learning process that occurs when narratives are used for constructing career stories. We propose that this learning process occurs stepwise in four cognitive stages: sensing, sifting, focusing, and understanding. To progress through these stages, an internal (with oneself) as well as an external (with relevant others) dialogue is needed. The case study used to illustrate the process is a story of unemployment and effectively shows how narratives can be created through expressive and reflective writing and how such a process may foster career learning in response to a boundary experience.     

Embracing Change: Further Examination of a “Capabilities and Benevolence” Beliefs Model in a Military Sample

Building on earlier research that used a “capabilities/benevolence” framework to examine an “embracing change” disposition, the current investigation extended previous cadet-based findings to a sample of company- and field-grade military officers. We hypothesized that officers with a high learning orientation and a high propensity to trust others would hold a significantly more positive attitude toward change than other individuals, even when controlling for the officer's general dispositional resistance to change. As with the earlier cadet results, the findings confirmed the hypothesis for learning orientation but not for trust. Discussion focused on the utility of acquiring a better understanding of an embracing change disposition and on the value of salting individuals with high learning orientations throughout the organization. Additionally, for future research, we consider the importance of employing multiple and diverse methods when exploring the embracing change construct. Such methodological expansion will undoubtedly reduce some conceptual ambiguities associated with the current study.     

Encoding effects of remindings

Understanding requires prior knowledge. Most theories and empirical work on understanding have focused on the use of general prior knowledge. In the experiments presented here, we examined the role of specific prior episodes in understanding. Subjects read ambiguous stories that had some superficial cue to make them think back to an earlier story. Experiment 1 shows that a superficial cue to an earlier story affects how the new story is interpreted. Experiment 2, in which a reading-time measure was used, provides evidence that this effect of the earlier story occurs during the initial understanding of the new story. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of understanding and the use of remindings in analogy.     

Making Sense of Climate Change: How Story Frames Shape Cognition

In 2006, Adam J. Berinsky and Donald R. Kinder published findings in the Journal of Politics that demonstrated that framing news as a story influences how individuals cognitively organize concepts and information. The study presented here moves forward in this tradition. This research combines samples obtained in the springs of 2009 and 2010 while conducting online experiments. In these experiments, slightly over 2,000 respondents are asked to organize concepts presented in one of three culturally nuanced stories about climate change or where information is presented as a list. Hierarchical cluster analysis indicates that when respondents are exposed to culturally congruent stories, respondent organizational patterns are more likely to mirror the story. We discuss the implications of these findings.     

Disability,inclusive adventurous training and adapted sport: Two soldiers' stories of involvement

ObjectivesTo generate insights into the personal meaning and value of an inclusive adventurous training and adapted sport course for military personnel who have experienced physical disability as a result of injuries sustained during active service.DesignNarrative storytelling approach based on collaboratively written creative nonfictions.MethodFirst-person stories were constructed with two male soldiers on the basis of informal interviews and conversations across five days of a residential adventure training and sport course.ResultsThe stories portray the personal benefits, meaning, and value of adventurous training and sport by illuminating each individual's experiences since injury/trauma, his experiences while on the course, and how these interact to shape psychological wellbeing and future life horizons. They reveal a complex interplay between physical, psychological, and social disability among some military personnel.ConclusionsThe story as analysis expands current understanding of the psychological effects of physical activity for injured military personnel through: (i) providing an alternative analytical approach; (ii) revealing subjectivities, personal meaning, and biographical connections to generate a holistic understanding of the individual; (iii) preserving the complexity and ambiguity that characterize lived experience to support plural understandings; (iv) sharing an embodied representation as an ethical act of witnessing another's life. We suggest these kinds of understandings are necessary for physical activity practitioners who wish to support military personnel who have sustained a disability.     

Opening the Closed Mind: The Effect of Exposure to Literature on the Need for Closure

The need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality. This experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to fictional short stories, as compared with exposure to nonfictional essays, will reduce need for cognitive closure. One hundred participants were assigned to read either an essay or a short story (out of a set of 8 essays and 8 short stories matched for length, reading difficulty, and interest). After reading, their need for cognitive closure was assessed. As hypothesized, when compared to participants in the essay condition, participants in the short story condition experienced a significant decrease in self-reported need for cognitive closure. The effect was particularly strong for participants who were habitual readers (of either fiction or non-fiction). These findings suggest that reading fictional literature could lead to better procedures of processing information generally, including those of creativity.     

Situating System and Giving Self Its Due: A Story-Based Counseling Model

This essay explores Michael P. Nichols' criticism of certain aspects of the family systems therapeutic model, especially his concern that it takes insufficient account of the self in the family system. Building on Nichols' argument, and noting the paradigm shift occurring among family therapists from systems to story thinking, the essay sets forth a story model of counseling having four primary postulates: (a) possibilities for change are inherent in every story told; (b) characters in stories are always more than their ascribed social roles; (c) systems or dyadic and triadic relationships are a property of stories; and (d) the self is both a constituent of stories and exists independently of them. The importance of autobiographical studies to mediate pastoral theology's theoretical interest in theological anthropology and the story model of pastoral counseling is noted but not explored in depth.     

Causal Attribution and Perceived Realism of Stories

Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world.     

Analogical problem solving

The use of an analogy from a semantically distant domain to guide the problemsolving process was investigated. The representation of analogy in memory and processes involved in the use of analogies were discussed theoretically and explored in five experiments. In Experiment I oral protocols were used to examine the processes involved in solving a problem by analogy. In all experiments subjects who first read a story about a military problem and its solution tended to generate analogous solutions to a medical problem (Duncker's “radiation problem”), provided they were given a hint to use the story to help solve the problem. Transfer frequency was reduced when the problem presented in the military story was substantially disanalogous to the radiation problem, even though the solution illustrated in the story corresponded to an effective radiation solution (Experiment II). Subjects in Experiment III tended to generate analogous solutions to the radiation problem after providing their own solutions to the military problem. Subjects were able to retrieve the story from memory and use it to generate an analogous solution, even when the critical story had been memorized in the context of two distractor stories (Experiment IV). However, when no hint to consider the story was given, frequency of analogous solutions decreased markedly. This decrease in transfer occurred when the story analogy was presented in a recall task along with distractor stories (Experiment IV), when it was presented alone, and when it was presented in between two attempts to solve the problem (Experiment V). Component processes and strategic variations in analogical problem solving were discussed. Issues related to noticing analogies and accessing them in memory were also examined, as was the relationship of analogical reasoning to other cognitive tasks.     

Tell Me a Story: How Children's Developing Domain Knowledge Affects Their Story Construction

Young children distinguish between the physical and biological domains of knowledge. The current study examines how this distinction is expressed in a story construction task. Three- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of pictures, one that depicted a normal event and one that depicted an event that violated either physical or biological causal structure. Children were asked to choose which picture to include in a story. Three-year-olds generally showed no systematic patterns of responses when constructing their stories. Four-year-olds, in contrast, made more normal than violation choices overall, and their stories were relatively consistent with regard to the fictional world's internal coherence. When 4-year-olds did include violation events in their stories, those violations tended to be of physical rather than biological causality. These data suggest that a general understanding of impossible events is underpinned by causal domain knowledge.     

Promoting Honesty: The Influence of Stories on Children's Lie‐Telling Behaviours and Moral Understanding

Moral stories are a means of communicating the consequences of our actions and emphasizing virtuous behaviour, such as honesty. However, the effect of these stories on children's lie‐telling has yet to be thoroughly explored. The current study investigated the influence of moral stories on children's willingness to lie for another individual. Children were read one of three stories prior to being questioned about an accidental wrongdoing: (1) a positive story, which emphasized the benefits of being honest; (2) a negative story, which outlined the potential costs of lying; and (3) a neutral story, which was unrelated to truth‐telling or lie‐telling. Initially, most children withheld information about the event. Older children were better able to maintain their lies throughout the interview. However, when asked direct questions, children in the positive story condition were more likely to tell the truth than those in the negative and neutral conditions. No significant differences were found between the negative and neutral story conditions. The present study also investigated the relationship between children's conceptual understanding and behaviour. The findings revealed that children's knowledge of truths and lies increased with age. Children who lied had significantly higher conceptual scores than those who did not lie. Furthermore, the type of story children were read had a significant impact on their evaluations of true and false statements. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Iowa Gambling Task Modified for Military Domain

One key component of optimal military decision making is that the decision maker demonstrates reinforcement learning. The modification of psychological tasks gives insight into understanding how to effectively train military decision makers and how experienced decision makers arrive at optimal or near optimal decisions. We developed a task modeled after the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) to measure military decision making performance. This new task focuses on high stakes and uncertain environments particular to military decision making conditions. Thirty-four U.S. military officers from all branches of service completed the tasks yielding decision data for validation. The new task retains essential characteristics of the foundational task and gives insight into reinforcement learning of military decision makers. Results indicate that the additional metric of regret defines higher performance at a trial-by-trial level, and clustering by multiple metrics defines high performance groups.     

The effects of depression on structural aspects of the recall of prose

Investigated depressed patients' memory for stories. This indicated that although normal Ss showed particularly good recall for units central to the structure of the story, this did not hold for depressed Ss. In contrast, effects of centrality were comparable in high- and low-IQ Ss and effects of imageability of story units were comparable in both depressed and normal Ss. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that depressed patients do not use structure to organize stories when encoding them. A failure to identify central aspects of material and selectively recall them is likely to be a handicap to everyday functioning.     

The personality assessment system: A radical hypothesis

Two stories are presented. The first story is about a clinical practitioner developing an assessment method beginning with a connection of test “signs” with behavior, and proceeding to a system that could mystify observers. The second story is about the application of scientific methods to explain how the system could work. Together the stories are an example of practice informing science, and science informing practice. The basic hypothesis used is that much of what we call personality is “caused” by differential aptitudes as modified by long-term learning. It is also assumed that people would prefer to use those aptitudes they feel are their better ones and avoid those in which they feel weaker.     

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.     

时间距离、封面故事和概率对框架效应的影响

研究一以时间距离和封面故事为变量考察对认知相关性的影响, 结果发现时间距离、封面故事及二者间的交互作用显著。坏封面故事中, 人们对1年后发生的事件要比1周、5年与50年后事件的认知相关程度都高, 即最重视; 好封面故事中, 4个时间距离间的认知相关程度差异不显著。研究二在1周、1年、5年和50年四个时间距离下, 探讨封面故事、框架和概率对风险偏好的影响, 结果表明：仅当时间距离为1周时, 不同概率在坏封面故事中风险倾向的差异显著。同时, 大概率下, 封面故事、封面故事与框架的交互作用对风险偏好的影响达到显著水平, 表现出在坏封面故事中, 与负面框架相比, 正面框架下风险回避的比例更高, 符合框架效应。结合研究一、二发现框架效应正发生在认知相关程度最低时。     

Cognitive structures in comprehension and memory of narrative discourse

The effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages were studied in two experiments. The experimental passages exemplify a class of simple narrative stories that is described by a generative grammar of plot structures. A comprehension model is proposed that assumes a hierarchical organizational framework of stories in memory, determined by the grammar, representing the abstract structural components of the plot. The quality and characteristics of subjects' memory for stories were tested on a variety of experimental tasks in which story organization was manipulated. Comprehensibility and recall were found to be a function of the amount of inherent plot structure in the story, independent of passage content. Recall probability of individual facts from passages depended on the structural centrality of the facts: Subjects tended to recall facts corresponding to high-level organizational story elements rather than lower-level details. In addition, story summarizations from memory tended to emphasize general structural characteristics rather than specific content. For successively presented stories, both structure and content manipulations influenced recall. Furthermore, repeating story structure across two passages produced facilitation in recall of the second passage, while repeating story content produced proactive interference. The implications for a model of memory for narrative discourse are discussed.     

Selves creating stories creating selves: a process model of self-development.

This article is focused on the growing empirical emphasis on connections between narrative and self-development. The authors propose a process model of self-development in which storytelling is at the heart of both stability and change in the self. Specifically, we focus on how situated stories help develop and maintain the self with reciprocal impacts on enduring aspects of self, specifically self-concept and the life story. This article emphasizes the research that has shown how autobiographical stories affect the self and provides a direction for future work to maximize the potential of narrative approaches to studying processes of self-development.     

The Influence of Preretirement Planning and Transferability of Skills on Naval Officers' Retirement Satisfaction and Adjustment

Although there is a plethora of research regarding civilian retirees' satisfaction and adjustment, there has been very little systematic research on the same issues for military retirees. Therefore, we sought to determine if preretirement planning and having knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that are readily transferable to civilian work affected the retirement satisfaction and adjustment of retired naval officers. Data (N=672) from a large scale, longitudinal study of naval officers' career development was used. Results indicate that both preretirement planning and transferability of KSAs influence the retirement satisfaction and adjustment of naval officers. The authors discuss how these findings add to our understanding of both military retirement and civilian late career transitions.