Being marked as different: The emotional politics of experiences of depression and migrant belongings

This article asks the question: “What does it mean to think about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ when migratory experience is enmeshed with the story of depression?”. The article focuses on the personal story of a woman who migrated from the United States (US) to Australia, and whose sense of disconnection and displacement in relation to everyday life is embedded within a narrative of depression. Our discussion of her twin narratives of emotional distress and migration is located within theoretical debates about depression, migration and the constitution of subjectivity. In particular, we draw on psychoanalytical approaches to subjectivity to argue that her emotional distress and the medical diagnosis of depression together represent a form of ‘experienc[ing] oneself as a subject’ (Butler, 2005), and function as a precondition to her narrative of migration. Ultimately, we conclude, the woman's intertwined narratives of depression and migration operate simultaneously to provide retroactive order to her subjectivity.     

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.     

Functions of personal and vicarious life stories: identity and empathy

The present study investigates functions of personal and vicarious life stories focusing on identity and empathy. Two-hundred-and-forty Danish high school students completed two life story questionnaires: one for their personal life story and one for a close other’s life story. In both questionnaires, they identified up to 10 chapters and self-rated the chapters on valence and valence of causal connections. In addition, they completed measures of identity disturbance and empathy. More positive personal life stories were related to lower identity disturbance and higher empathy. Vicarious life stories showed a similar pattern with respect to identity but surprisingly were unrelated to empathy. In addition, we found positive correlations between personal and vicarious life stories for number of chapters, chapter valence, and valence of causal connections. The study indicates that both personal and vicarious life stories may contribute to identity.     

Legitimizing the “War on Terror”: Political Myth in Official‐Level Rhetoric

This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007 ) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official‐level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the “War on Terror.” Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the “War on Terror.”     

Personal and parents’ life stories in patients with borderline personality disorder

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display disturbances in understanding self and others. We examined whether these disturbances extended to how patients described their personal and parents’ life stories and to measures of identity, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Thirty BPD patients and 30 matched control participants described personal and parents’ life stories and completed measures of identity disturbance, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Compared to the controls, patients with BPD described their personal and their parents’ life stories more negatively and with fewer themes of agency and communion fulfillment. Patients and controls showed equally complex reasoning about their personal life stories, but patients displayed less complexity and more self‐other confusion, when reasoning about their parents’ stories. Patients also differed from controls on identity disturbance, alexithymia, and empathy. The results suggest that patients’ storied understanding of themselves and others are disturbed and should be taken into account to better understand BPD.     

2001 SEYMOUR B. SARASON AWARD ADDRESS: The Spirit of Community Psychology

Community psychology as a field may have lost some of its original spirit; a spirit dominant at the founding of the field. Spirit is a difficult concept to discuss since it is a concept beyond usual discourse in psychology as a denotative, measurable and verifiable concept. Taking the lead from William James, Spirit, however elusive, is most essential to a sense of self. I offer three suggestions to enhance and to make our individual and collective spirit more vital: (1) Continuing education in the history of community psychology; (2) Creating time to share stories about our work; (3) Creating safe settings to enlarge our spirit. These ideas are offered as pragmatic suggestions to enable us to create more coherence between our personal and professional selves.     

训练对6岁儿童友谊特性认知发展的影响

研究目的是寻找促进幼儿对友谊特性认知发展的有效干预措施。采用有结构的故事讲解加系列提问的方法,对实验组２０名６岁幼儿进行为期２周的训练,结果表明,这种训练有效地促进了他们对友谊特性的认知发展,其主要效果表现在互相帮助和冲突解决两个方面。     

Personality characteristics of highly generative adults as assessed in Q-sort ratings of life stories

The present study compared the personality characteristics assessed in life stories of 40 highly generative adults to those in the life stories of a contrasting sample of 30 less generative adults. Life-story interviews of all 70 subjects were rated with the California Adult Q-Sort (CAQ; Block, 1961). The results were compared to the “expert” generativity CAQ profile compiled by Peterson and Klohnen (1995). The results indicated that highly generative adults were more likely to construct life stories indicative of such positive generativity characteristics as “behaves in a giving way toward others” and “is turned to for advice and reassurance” compared to adults low in generativity. Furthermore, the highly generative adults related life-story accounts in which negative generativity qualities such as “has hostility toward others” and “is self-indulgent” were more uncharacteristic than those expressed in the low-generativity adults' stories. The study adds to a growing empirical literature on the meaning and manifestations of generativity in adult lives and suggests that the CAQ is a useful tool for uncovering personality characteristics expressed in the life-story accounts generated by adults.     

COGNITIVE THEISM: SOURCES OF ACCOMMODATION BETWEEN SECULARISM AND RELIGION

Abstract. Religion persists, even within enlightened secular society, because it has adaptive functions. In particular, Ralph Wendell Burhoe's theory holds that religion is the repository of cultural wisdom that most encourages mutual altruism among nonkin, long-term social survival, and human progress. This article suggests a variant of Burhoe's rationalized naturalistic view. Cognitive theism is a proposal that secularists sometimes take religion on its own terms by suspending disbelief about God. If we consider particular human capacities and limitations in memory, perception, personality, and motivation, the regulated “mind expansion” of cognitive theism may help us to evaluate, coordinate, and invigorate things in a modern environment. In this environment, communicative and travel technologies have led to a high loading of consciousness with a historically unusual diverse range of experiences and responsibilities, a high rate of cultural change relative to biological evolution, and a tendency to factionalize. Burhoe's extension of the concept of symbiosis to the coevolution of culture and genes is modified here in recognition of individual differences and of individuals' potential for choosing strategies, recombining in groups, and learning. In human biocultural symbiont pools, cultural phenomena can evolve while changing partners in a dance with genetic substrates, a dance that broadly supports these substrates. In the context of diversity and incessant change in a large predominantly secular community, Judeo-Christian monotheism can have a valuable advisory unifying function.