Victims' Stories: A Call to Care

In her book Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, Diana Meyers offers a careful analysis of victims' stories as a narrative genre, and she argues that stories in this genre function as a call to care: they both depict a moral void and issue a moral demand, thereby fostering the development of a culture of human rights. This article, while finding Meyers's articulation of this idea compelling, questions Meyers's account of how victims' stories do their moral work. Whereas Meyers argues that victims' stories are complete narratives, characterized by a distinctive form of closure, it suggests that the moral power of victims' stories may lie in part in their open‐endedness or lack of closure. In telling their stories, victims engage their audiences in a new moral relationship and implicitly give them a role to play in bringing about the moral (and narrative) closure they seek.     

Effects of Pronoun Type and Gender Role Consistency on Children's Recall and Interpretation of Stories

The pronouns he, she, and they were compared with he and she alternating, to examine recall and gender interpretation of stories. Participants, who were ethnically diverse, were 48 girls and boys aged 6 and 9 from working-class and middle-class areas of San Antonio. Children read stories about imaginary characters of ambiguous gender referred to by varying pronouns and enjoying either stereotypically masculine, feminine, or neutral activities. Recall was higher for girls, older children, and children who heard stories containing she instead of he. Six-year-olds, but not 9-year-olds, recalled more information from stories containing gender-consistent activities. Interpretation of character gender for he, she, and he/she alternating was based largely on pronoun; for stories using they, it was based both on pronoun and activity. The results underscore the nongeneric nature of generic pronouns and the gender differences in recall and interpretation evoked by contact with gender specific reading material.     

Informing supervision practice through research: A narrative inquiry

Intention: This study focused on questions of whether and how clients benefit from supervision. As practitioner research, the study was intended to shape the researchers’ own supervision practice. Method: The qualitative approach was based on interviews with a small number of experienced practitioners about their supervision experiences. The findings are presented in the form of reflexive stories, told by each researcher. Findings: In these stories the researchers tell how engagement with experienced practitioners’ accounts of their past supervision shaped the hopes and intentions the researchers hold for their future supervision. Implications forpractice: The stories suggest there are therapeutic benefits in an ethic of transparency that provides for practices that overtly carry stories in both directions between counselling and supervision.     

Telling a “baby story”: Mothers narrating their pre-schoolers' past across two cultural contexts

Mothers from two middle-class contexts from Berlin, Germany (n = 35), and Delhi, India (n = 28) told a baby story to their 3-year olds about an event that had happened during the children's first year of life. The contexts represented two cultural models: the model of psychological autonomy (Berlin) and the model of autonomy-relatedness (Delhi). We investigated the culture-specific functions of this reminiscing task as reflected in the structure, content and specificity of the stories. The stories in both contexts were minimally interactive and the children contributed few elaborations themselves. Stories told by the Berlin mothers were longer, and more specific. Mothers in both contexts were similarly elaborative relative to being repetitive. The stories were highly child-centred in both contexts but even more child-centred for Delhi. Importantly, maternal narrations from the Berlin context were embedded in a frame story that characterised the child's individual past; stories thus constructed “exclusive baby stories”. Most stories told by the Delhi mothers had no frame story but instead were about what the child used to do as a baby in general; they thus constructed “routine baby stories”. Results are interpreted in the view of the underlying self, social and directive functions of this reminiscing task.     

My partner’s stories: relationships between personal and vicarious life stories within romantic couples

In this paper, we examined relationships and differences between personal and vicarious life stories, i.e., the life stories one knows of others. Personal and vicarious life stories of both members of 51 young couples (102 participants), based on McAdams’ Life Story Interview (2008), were collected. We found significant positive relationships between participants’ personal and vicarious life stories on agency and communion themes and redemption sequences. We also found significant positive relationships between participants’ vicarious life stories about their partners and those partners’ personal life stories on agency and communion, but not redemption. Furthermore, these relationships were not explained by similarity between couples’ two personal life stories, as no associations were found between couples’ personal stories on agency, communion and redemption. These results suggest that the way we construct the vicarious life stories of close others may reflect how we construct our personal life stories.     

The narrative worlds of what is and what if

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of what is and what if. Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for understanding children's play and stories. Drawing on examples of children's spontaneous pretend play and story telling, the paper argues that, beginning in their second year, children use pretend play to differentiate the worlds of everyday-lived reality from an alternative pretend sphere; the world of as if. By their third year, children engage in play which hangs on a narrative framework. Such pretend play offers children further options: the fictional world of plausible make believe which simulates everyday life, what is, and the fictional world of more fantastic possibilities, what if. While the child's use of a narrative framework in her pretend play expands her range of psychological worlds, the developmental shift to purely verbal stories, sometimes during the child's third year, significantly adds to her ability to explore such worlds. An examination of the language young children use to accompany their narrative play and to tell stories demonstrates the ways in which children exploit the narrative form to contrast, compare, and traverse the constructed worlds of what is and what if.     

Enhanced perceptual priming for neutral stimuli in a traumatic context: A pathway to intrusive memories?

Clinical observations suggest that re-experiencing symptoms are triggered by stimuli that are perceptually similar to those present shortly before the trauma or its worst moments. Two experiments investigated the possible role of perceptual priming in this phenomenon. Volunteers (N = 28, N = 62) watched a series of “traumatic” and neutral picture stories, and completed blurred object identification (priming) and recognition memory tasks. Neutral objects that immediately preceded the “traumatic” stories were more strongly primed, but not better recognised, than objects from neutral stories. Enhanced priming predicted subsequent re-experiencing symptoms. The results support the role of perceptual priming in re-experiencing.     

Coyote Politics: Trickster Tales and Feminist Futures

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.     

Victims' Stories of Human Rights Abuse: The Ethics of Ownership,Dissemination, and Reception

This paper addresses three commentaries on Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights. In response to Vittorio Bufacchi, it argues that asking victims to tell their stories needn't be coercive or unjust and that victims are entitled to decide whether and under what conditions to tell their stories. In response to Serene Khader, it argues that empathy with victims' stories can contribute to building a culture of human rights provided that measures are taken to overcome the implicit biases and colonialist interpellations she identifies. In response to Andrea Westlund, it proposes a taxonomy of types of narrative closure and offers some arguments to strengthen her view that empathy with victims' stories endows audience members with a new reason and new motivation to support human rights.     

Socialization of teenage girls through teen-magazine fiction: The making of a new woman or an old lady?

A content analysis of the fiction in Seventeen and 'Teen revealed that few of the stories offered anything but traditional socialization messages for teenage girls. In more than half, the main character did not actively solve her own problems but depended on someone else to do it for her. Almost half of the conflicts were about relationships with boys. Excluding the 10 rated by coders as neutral, all but 2 of the 44 occupations mentioned in the stories were stereotypically portrayed.     

Narrative models of action and interaction

This paper explores some issues which a humanlike story system ought to encompass, but which are usually not in the main focus of narrative models since Propp. We argue that knowledge about actions and interactions can account not only for how stories are constructed, but also for why some stories are more interesting and enduring than others. We analyze a traditional English folktale in these terms, and show how classes of surface expressions make recoverable the underlying structures and dependencies that schema-based understanders comprise.     

Bulletin Board

Abstract

When psychotherapy is viewed as shared reconstruction, there are implications for both clients and therapists. My clients become sources of expectations, myths, thought, and feelings about themselves and their therapists. I, as therapist, become a source of intentions and reflections, with capacities for self-awareness and abilities to construe my clients and their constructs, languages, and metaphors. Both participants in psychotherapy can then be seen as involved in reconstruction through the sharing and rebuilding of narratives. It is the life stories of clients that are likely to be more changed in therapy, but my life stories and my stories about the therapeutic process are also open to change     

Some Structural Variables in Auditory Projective Testing

This study explored perceived pleasantness of auditory projective stimuli as related to three aspects of the projective response; emotional tone, RT and length of stories. Thirty blind and 30 sighted males, comparable in age and intelligence, told stories in response to eight selected auditory stimuli and rated them for pleasantness. Emotional tone varied significantly with pleasantness for 5 out of 8 sounds. Pleasantness was not significantly related to story length nor to RT, except for the sound of weeping. Blind Ss told longer stories than the sighted. Apparent consistent individual differences in response to the auditory projective method were observed. This technique seems useful in the study of personality, perception and cognition of sighted and blind persons.     

The holistic and spiritual relevance of Bible stories among Finnish 10-year-old pupils: a classroom case study

Abstract

In this article, we explore what kind of relevance Bible stories have on 10-year-old pupils in religious education lessons. The data was gathered in Lutheran RE lessons in Finland. The Bible stories were told by using special storytelling methods, Godly Play and Religious Pedagogic Practice. The study used stimulated recall method interviews to study the reflections the students (N = 9) had during lessons. Analysis was done via deductive content analysis. The study showed that different forms of holistic relevance could be identified in the recollections of the students. The most common forms of relevance were emotional, moral and religious relevance. The study indicates that different kinds of stories emphasise different kinds of relevance and while there were some similar features in the relevance of the stories among the students, there were also differences. In the end, the implications of this study to teacher education and classroom learning are discussed.     

Breast cancer representations in Canadian news media: a critical discourse analysis of meanings and the implications for identity

Despite the importance of critical media work, much is to be learned about breast cancer representations within media discourses and the implications for women’s identity construction. Building on research from Australia from a discursive perspective, this article used an eclectic approach to critical discourse analysis to explore the cultural construction of breast cancer in 25 detailed stories within Canada’s two national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Ten images accompanying stories and 17 advertisements/public service announcements were also analyzed to contextualize discourses and subject positions/identities within the stories. Analysis of this media affords the unique opportunity to explore taken for granted assumptions and prevailing meanings about breast cancer and the implications for subjectivity. Two primary discourses were identified: a discourse of biomedicine and a discourse of healthism. Subject positions identified included “breast cancer survivor,” “the good consumer,” and the “medical expert.” The psychological, social, political, and health promotion implications are discussed.     

Sour Grapes: Transgenerational Family Pathology in the Hebrew Bible

An analysis of Bible stories about the patriarchs' treatment of their children reveals pathological family patterns, which reoccur in subsequent generations. The outcome of parental favoritism and of unhealthy coalitions is sibling rivalry, leading to hatred and to violence among the children. The transgenerational chain of pathologies is traced back to God's differential treatment of Cain and Abel and to the resultant murder. The legitimization of family pathologies by the biblical stories is discussed.     

Family influences on dysfunctional thinking in anxious children

Anxious children are found to interpret ambiguous stories in a negative way. The current study attempted to examine the possible influence of parental fear and parental interpretation bias on the maintenance of such an interpretation bias. Children varying in level of anxiety (n=25) and their parents, filled in a questionnaire to measure their own fears, and gave their interpretations concerning nine ambiguous stories, relevant for childhood ‘interactional’ anxieties: social anxiety, separation anxiety, and generalized anxiety. Then, parents were asked to talk with their children about three of the stories. After the family discussion the children had to give their final interpretations. Results indicated that parents' self‐reported fear level and interpretation bias were associated with children's interpretation bias before the family discussion. However, no evidence was found for the idea that parents maintain or enhance the interpretation bias of their children. That is, irrespective of parental fear and parental interpretation bias, children interpreted the ambiguous stories as less negative after discussing them with their parents. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

REALLY BELIEVING IN FICTION

Abstract: How is it possible to respond emotionally to that which we believe is not the case? All of the many responses to this “paradox of fiction” make one or more of three important mistakes: (1) neglecting the context of believing, (2) assuming that belief is an all‐or‐nothing affair, and (3) assuming that if you believe that p then you cannot also reasonably believe that not‐p. My thesis is that we react emotionally to stories because we do believe what stories tell us – not fictionally‐believe, not make‐believe, but believe in the ordinary way in which we believe anything at all.