Cracking the Code: Using Personal Narratives in Research

The use of personal narratives in research across the field of psychology has dramatically increased in recent years. In studies spanning a wide range of topics, personal event narratives have provided especially valuable insights into the processes and products of cognitive development. This article offers a guide for researchers who might use personal narratives in research currently or in the future. Issues and best practices surrounding collecting, transcribing, and coding personal narratives are presented. Practical challenges, commonly used methods, and recommended guidelines are described. Illustrations of different types of personal narrative coding systems are offered. The article also highlights benefits of and resources for conducting personal narrative research.     

Gender Differences in Speech Temporal Patterns Detected Using Lagged Co-occurrence Text-Analysis of Personal Narratives

This paper describes a novel methodology for the detection of speech patterns. Lagged co-occurrence analysis (LCA) utilizes the likelihood that a target word will be uttered in a certain position after a trigger word. Using this methodology, it is possible to uncover a statistically significant repetitive temporal patterns of word use, compared to a random choice of words. To demonstrate this new tool on autobiographical narratives, 200 subjects related each a 5-min story, and these stories were transcribed and subjected to LCA, using software written by the author. This study focuses on establishing the usefulness of LCA in psychological research by examining its associations with gender. The application of LCA to the corpus of personal narratives revealed significant differences in the temporal patterns of using the word “I” between male and female speakers. This finding is particularly demonstrative of the potential for studying speech temporal patterns using LCA, as men and women tend to utter the pronoun “I” in comparable frequencies. Specifically, LCA of the personal narratives showed that, on average, men tended to have shorter interval between their use of the pronoun, while women speak longer between two subsequent utterances of the pronoun. The results of this study are discussed in light of psycholinguistic factors governing male and female speech communities.     

注意资源对正常人消极情绪偏向的影响

本研究以正常人为研究对象,分别采用词汇判断任务和后掩蔽范式,以两个行为实验考察了阈上/阈下两种情况下,注意资源的多少对消极情绪偏向的影响.结果发现,在阈上条件下,只有当注意资源缺乏时,才能出现消极情绪偏向;在阈下条件下,无论注意资源多少,都没有出现消极情绪偏向.表明消极情绪偏向在正常人中的出现不是"无条件的",而是受到注意资源多少的影响.     

A Grounded Theory Study of Spirituality: Using Personal Narratives Suggested by Spiritual Images

This study expanded on traditional concepts of spirituality through an analysis of narratives derived from images with spiritual content. Twenty-five participants were selected based on their being actively involved in spiritual practices. They were requested to tell TAT-type stories to a series of twelve images that revolved around spiritual themes. The resulting 300 stories were coded according to Grounded Theory procedures. A theory of spirituality emerged that centered upon the expression of suffering and the expectation of it being relieved. Results suggest that the personal spiritual process is one that expects and seeks transformation of the suffering through a connection with another, a connection with the transcendent, acquiring wisdom, or transforming the internal state.     

Emotion Perception Accuracy and Bias in Face-to-Face Versus Cyberbullying

ABSTRACT. The authors investigated the association of traditional and cyber forms of bullying and victimization with emotion perception accuracy and emotion perception bias. Four basic emotions were considered (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear); 526 middle school students (280 females; M age = 12.58 years, SD = 1.16 years) were recruited, and emotionality was controlled. Results indicated no significant findings for girls. Boys with higher levels of traditional bullying did not show any deficit in perception accuracy of emotions, but they were prone to identify happiness and fear in faces when a different emotion was expressed; in addition, male cyberbullying was related to greater accuracy in recognizing fear. In terms of the victims, cyber victims had a global problem in recognizing emotions and a specific problem in processing anger and fear. It was concluded that emotion perception accuracy and bias were associated with bullying and victimization for boys not only in traditional settings but also in the electronic ones. Implications of these findings for possible intervention are discussed.     

Visual-Field Bias in the Judgment of Facial Expression of Emotion

The left and right hemispheres of the brain are differentially related to the processing of emotions. Although there is little doubt that the right hemisphere is relatively superior for processing negative emotions, controversy exists over the hemispheric role in the processing of positive emotions. Eighty right-handed normal male participants were examined for visual-field (left-right) differences in the perception of facial expressions of emotion. Facial composite (RR, LL) and hemifacial (R, L) sets depicting emotion expressions of happiness and sadness were prepared. Pairs of such photographs were presented bilaterally for 150 ms, and participants were asked to select the photographs that looked more expressive. A left visual-field superiority (a right-hemisphere function) was found for sad facial emotion. A hemispheric advantage in the perception of happy expression was not found.     

The Bias of Crowds: How Implicit Bias Bridges Personal and Systemic Prejudice

As public awareness of implicit bias has grown in recent years, studies have raised important new questions about the nature of implicit bias effects. First, implicit biases are widespread and robust on average, yet are unstable across a few weeks. Second, young children display implicit biases indistinguishable from those of adults, which suggests to many that implicit biases are learned early. Yet, if implicit biases are unstable over weeks, how can they be stable for decades? Third, meta-analyses suggest that individual differences in implicit bias are associated weakly, although significantly, with individual differences in behavioral outcomes. Yet, studies of aggregate levels of implicit bias (i.e., countries, states, counties) are strongly associated with aggregate levels of disparities and discrimination. These puzzles are difficult to reconcile with traditional views, which treat implicit bias as an early-learned attitude that drives discrimination among individuals who are high in bias. We propose an alternative view of implicit bias, rooted in concept accessibility. Concept accessibility can, in principle, vary both chronically and situationally. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that most of the systematic variance in implicit bias is situational. Akin to the “wisdom of crowds” effect, implicit bias may emerge as the aggregate effect of individual fluctuations in concept accessibility that are ephemeral and context-dependent. This bias of crowds theory treats implicit bias tests as measures of situations more than persons. We show how the theory can resolve the puzzles posed and generate new insights into how and why implicit bias propagates inequalities.     

Gender Bias in the Measurement of Workaholism

Past research suggests gender differences in workaholism might be due to differences in how men and women respond to the item content in workaholism measures. Using item response theory differential item functioning, we show women are less likely to report some workaholism items, leading to contamination. Specifically, women are less likely to report spending more time at work than other activities, and staying at work longer than others. We speculate that societal norms and practical restrictions on women's time results in lower endorsement rates for these items compared to men, and thus underestimates their workaholism. Results contradict past findings that men and women are similar in regard to workaholism and suggest women are in fact higher in workaholism than men. Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Between Dream Cities and Reality: Personal Narratives of Ex-Soviets in Israel

Domestication of space is a major problem for migrants, particularly when they settle in a geographically remote country with a markedly different climate and culture. This paper analyzes attitudes to city life in the country of origin and in the new homeland in personal narratives of immigrants to Israel from the countries of the former Soviet Union. The material was drawn from in-depth unstructured interviews conducted in 1999–2002 and 2005–2006, and Israeli Russian-language Internet forums. Soviet Jews were predominantly city dwellers, and their immigration stories are permeated with explicit and tacit comparisons of the space of the two countries. The cities of origin are idealized, and their image has disintegrated into hospitable and warm cities of pre-emigration life on the one hand, and unfamiliar, alien cities of post-Soviet period on the other. In Israel many ex-Soviets chose to live in the so-called development towns. Attracted by relatively inexpensive apartments, the newcomers found themselves trapped in places where jobs are scarce and the quality of life has been recently dropping. In reflecting on various towns, interviewees focus on physical and symbolic dimensions, the most frequent being: big–small, center–periphery, exposed–protected, and powerful–weak. In contemporary Russian culture center is associated with job opportunities and entertainment, with high social status and good quality of life. In Israel the opposition center–periphery has retained its significance, yet the whole country is considered by many immigrants as deeply provincial, cut off from the rest of the world and devoid of opportunity for the young, the conviction that is supported by publications in the Russian-language media.

Emotion in Personal Construct Theory: A Controversial Question

George Kelly's personal construct theory (PCT) has been accused of disregarding the role of emotion in human life. This charge originates from a misunderstanding of PCT's basic assumptions. Kelly deals with experiences commonly called “emotional” in terms of dimensions of transition according to a genuinely constructivist epistemology. A review of the literature shows few elaborations of Kelly's original formulation of constructs relating to transitions, and even some contributions critical of Kelly's approach to emotions. This article rebuts the criticisms while making clear the epistemological and theoretical bases of Kelly's treatment of transitional experiences, its peculiarities, and its role in the diagnostic/therapeutic process.     

态度测量偏差研究

1　态度测量的认知心理过程态度储存在长时记忆中。如Ｔｏｕｒａｎｇｅａｕ和Ｆｉｓｋｅ等人把态度看作是相关信息联结成的网络或图式 ,当遇到与某种态度相关的问题时 ,相应的态度网或图式就会被激活。根据对态度结构的研究 ,Ｔｏｕｒａｎｇｅａｕ和Ｒａｓｉｎｓｋｉ提出了一个态度测量的过程模型 ,它包括理解、回忆、判断、报告四个阶段。理解过程的关键是相关态度结构的可获取性 ;回忆过程取决于被试对问题的理解以及拥有的信息量 ;判断过程取决于判断时所选择的维度、对维度重要性定位时所采用的比较标准 ,以及维度的权重 ;报告是被试把…     

How Children with Head Injury Represent Real and Deceptive Emotion in Short Narratives

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions those events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affective valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an explicit mental representation of those states. In turn, this representation provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified according to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a character may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a deceptive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury and 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and deceptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narratives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could recall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within the head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury and frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of deceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distinction between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude that children with head injury understand emotional communication, the spontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communication, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to influence others through deceptive facial expressions.     

Chinese and South Asian Conceptions of the Good Life and Personal Narratives

Are cultural visions of a good life reflected in how people narrate the personal past? Do they tend to emphasize experiences that correspond to their cultural commitments about what is important and worthwhile in the life they are hoping to live? To examine this possibility, Chinese and South Asian international students at a Canadian university were compared on the content of their narrative accounts of their post-arrival experiences. Predictions about how these groups differ in the prevalence of various topical categories were made on the basis of previous research on cultural conceptions of a good life. A majority of the predictions were confirmed, supporting the general claim that Chinese tend more toward practical and prudential concerns, and less toward spiritual and beneficent concerns, than do South Asians.     

Children's Personal Narratives and Their Mothers' Responsiveness as Covariates of the Children's Compliance

Twenty-six mother–child dyads volunteered to be observed interacting at home, and the children agreed to participate in interviews designed to elicit their personal narratives. Observers coded the children's compliance with mother instructions and the mothers' responsiveness to their children's prosocial behaviors. Other raters coded the children's narratives for coherence of story structure. Correlational analyses of the data sets confirmed hypotheses that mother responsiveness and child coherence scores would account for separate variance in the children's willingness to comply with their mothers' instructions. These results were interpreted within the literature on child–mother synchrony and functional aspects of children's personal narratives.     

Emotion Reporting Using Electronic Diaries Reduces Anxiety Symptoms in Girls With Emotion Dysregulation

Theory and empirical research suggest that electronic diaries, which require children to report on their emotional experiences, might encourage emotional processing and facilitate a reduction in symptoms of anxiety, particularly for children exhibiting emotion-related deficits. Electronic diaries were given to 52 children (aged 7–12) to track their emotions and associated intensity for 7?days; anxiety was assessed prior to and after the use of the electronic diary by both parent- and child-report. It was hypothesized that the use of an electronic diary to track emotional experiences would lead to a reduction in anxiety symptoms for those children high in poor awareness, high in expressive reluctance, and low in emotion coping. The use of electronic diaries was effective at reducing child self-reported anxiety symptoms in girls who reported low emotion coping and reducing parent-reported anxiety for girls who reported a high reluctance to express emotions. Current findings suggest that having children identify their emotions using electronic diaries may be particularly beneficial for girls who are reluctant to express emotions and who report poor coping abilities.     

Preliminary Findings from a Qualitative Study of Trauma Survivors in Treatment: Changes in Personal Narratives

This article seeks to document the characteristics and themes of later trauma recovery using a grounded theory analysis of interviews with trauma survivors enrolled in outpatient treatment. Little research exists that speaks to patients’ own accounts of the process of trauma recovery. Such accounts might elucidate how psychotherapy helps survivors make and remake meaning of their lives, their experience of traumatic events, and the resources they might call on in psychotherapy to secure recovery. This study examined narrative material gathered in a series of interviews with trauma survivors (n?=?14) who had been in treatment for an average of 8 months and could be described as in a later phase of the recovery process. Two significant themes emerged from the analysis: (a) greater coherence to the trauma narrative, and (b) the emergence of a more reflective and observational stance with respect to one's history. Implications for trauma-informed therapy are discussed.     

Anticipating the Self: Toward a Personal Construct Model of Emotion

Previous accounts of the role of emotion in construct theory place insufficient emphasis on the constructive role of emotion as a “feeling toward.” Emotion is regarded either as an epiphenomenon of acts of construal or as an outcome of prior cognitive processes. It is argued in this paper that emotion performs an anticipatory role in pursuit of the current concerns of the self, a view that follows from a closer analysis of the function of anticipation. A revision of the control systems theory of Carver and Scheier (1981) is proposed, in which emotional anticipation at the level of the self is distinguished from schema-based anticipation at the level of behavior. Given the framework of personal construct theory as a method of analysis, this revised view of emotion enables a range of self-concept processes to be better understood.     

个人自立对注意偏向影响的眼动研究

通过使用基于眼动的罗夏墨迹测验图观察任务与新异/自我观点观察任务来探究个人自立对注意偏向的影响。结果发现:(1)除了第四张图片以外,个人自立高分组在观察其他9张罗夏墨迹测验图时的眨眼率都显著或边缘显著的高于低分组;(2)个人自立高分组在观察两张新异/自我语句图片时进行新异/自我观点回视的次数都要显著多于低分组;(3)在观察第1张新异/自我语句图时,个人自立低分组对自我观点的注意明显多于新异观点。