Age differences in understanding precedent-setting decisions and authorities' responses to violations of deontic rules

Oral narrative skills are assumed to develop through parent-child interactive routines. One such routine is shared reading. A causal link between shared reading and narrative knowledge, however, has not been clearly established. The current research tested whether an 8-week shared reading intervention enhanced the fictional narrative skills of children entering formal education. Dialogic reading, a shared reading activity that involves elaborative questioning techniques, was used to engage children in oral interaction during reading and to emphasize elements of story knowledge. Participants were 40 English-speaking 5- and 6-year-olds who were assigned to either the dialogic reading group or an alternative treatment group. Analysis of covariance results found that the dialogic reading children’s posttest narratives were significantly better on structure and context measures than those for the alternative treatment children, but results differed for produced or retold narratives. The dialogic reading children also showed expressive vocabulary gains. Overall, this study concretely determined that aspects of fictional narrative construction knowledge can be learned from interactive book reading.     

Higher-order factors of the Big Five predict exploration and threat in life stories

Research has not previously examined whether higher-order traits of the Big Five are related to characteristics of life story narratives. The current study explored possible links between the broad dispositions of Stability (comprising the shared aspects of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability) and Plasticity (comprising the shared aspects of Extraversion and Openness) with narrative accounts of threat and exploration in the life-stories of 128 adults. Stability was inversely related to construals of threat in narratives, and Plasticity was positively related to exploration in narratives after controlling for the suppressor effects of demographic variables. These findings add to the research linking higher-order factors of the Big-Five to important domains as well as research linking dispositional traits to narrative identity.     

Portrayal of personality in Victorian novels reflects modern research findings but amplifies the significance of agreeableness

All literature embodies an implicit theory of personality and human nature (Hogan, 1976). The research described here investigates the implicit personality theory embedded in the behavior of 435 characters in 143 canonical Victorian novels. Characters were rated on the Web by 519 scholars and students of 19th-century British literature. Ratings included the characters’ goals, success in achieving goals, mate preferences and strategies, and personality according to the Five Factor Model. Results suggest that novels by Victorian authors largely reflect personality and human nature as understood by modern personality psychology, but Victorian authors amplify the significance of agreeableness and thus, whether intentionally or not, encourage cooperative impulses in readers.     

Aging and the segmentation of narrative film

The perception of event structure in continuous activity is important for everyday comprehension. Although the segmentation of experience into events is a normal concomitant of perceptual processing, previous research has shown age differences in the ability to perceive structure in naturalistic activity, such as a movie of someone washing a car. However, past research has also shown that older adults have a preserved ability to comprehend events in narrative text, which suggests that narrative may improve the event processing of older adults. This study tested whether there are age differences in event segmentation at the intersection of continuous activity and narrative: narrative film. Younger and older adults watched and segmented a narrative film, The Red Balloon, into coarse and fine events. Changes in situational features, such as changes in characters, goals, and objects predicted segmentation. Analyses revealed little age-difference in segmentation behavior. This suggests the possibility that narrative structure supports event understanding for older adults.     

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.     

Examining the factor structure of narrative meaning-making for stressful events and relations with psychological distress

This study examined the underlying factor structure of 15 narrative meaning-making indices for narratives of stressful events, and explored the incremental validity of the narrative factor solution over and above general personality traits in predicting various indices of psychological well-being. Two-hundred and twenty four undergraduates (M_age?=?19.2 years, SD_age?=?2.1; 114 males and 110 females; 67.6% Caucasian, 12.0% East Asian, 7.6% African-American, 4.0% South Asian, 2.2% Hispanic, and 6.7% as mixed or Other origin) wrote about the most traumatic experience in their life, and completed a series of psychological questionnaires. The narratives were coded in 15 ways theoretically derived from the narrative meaning-making literature. A series of exploratory structural equation models indicated that a four-factor solution best approximated the data. The four factors were: positive processing, negative processing, integrative meaning, and structure. All four factors related differentially to indices of well-being over and above traits. There appear to be four distinct, but related, factors of narrative meaning-making for memories of stressful events, which shed light on the nuanced relations with well-being.     

When Cars Hit Trucks and Girls Hug Boys: The Effect of Animacy on Word Order in Gestural Language Creation

A well‐known typological observation is the dominance of subject‐initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to produce SOV order, regardless of their native language biases. Interestingly, when the patient is animate, gesturers shift away from SOV to use of other orders, like SVO and OSV. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed for this switch: the noisy channel account (Gibson et al., 2013) and the role conflict account (Hall, Mayberry, & Ferreira, 2013). We set out to distinguish between these two hypotheses, disentangling event reversibility and patient animacy, by looking at gestural sequences for events with two inanimate participants (inanimate‐inanimate, reversible). We replicated the previous findings of a preference for SOV order when describing animate‐inanimate, irreversible events as well as a decrease in the use of SOV when presented with animate‐animate, reversible events. Accompanying the drop in SOV, in a novel condition we observed an increase in the use of SVO and OSV orders when describing events involving two animate entities. In sum, we find that the observed avoidance of SOV order in gestural language creation paradigms when the event includes an animate agent and patient is driven by the animacy of the participants rather than the reversibility of the event. We suggest that findings from gestural creation paradigms are not automatically linkable to spoken language typology.     

Word Detection in Sung and Spoken Sentences in Children With Typical Language Development or With Specific Language Impairment

Background: Previous studies have reported that children score better in language tasks using sung rather than spoken stimuli. We examined word detection ease in sung and spoken sentences that were equated for phoneme duration and pitch variations in children aged 7 to 12 years with typical language development (TLD) as well as in children with specific language impairment (SLI ), and hypothesized that the facilitation effect would vary with language abilities. Method: In Experiment 1, 69 children with TLD (7–10 years old) detected words in sentences that were spoken, sung on pitches extracted from speech, and sung on original scores. In Experiment 2, we added a natural speech rate condition and tested 68 children with TLD (7–12 years old). In Experiment 3, 16 children with SLI and 16 age-matched children with TLD were tested in all four conditions. Results: In both TLD groups, older children scored better than the younger ones. The matched TLD group scored higher than the SLI group who scored at the level of the younger children with TLD . None of the experiments showed a facilitation effect of sung over spoken stimuli. Conclusions: Word detection abilities improved with age in both TLD and SLI groups. Our findings are compatible with the hypothesis of delayed language abilities in children with SLI , and are discussed in light of the role of durational prosodic cues in words detection.     

“This is My Community”: Reproducing and Resisting Boundaries of Exclusion in Contested Public Spaces

The way that public space is structured has significant implications for identity, social interaction, and participation in society. For those experiencing homelessness, with no or limited private space, survival hinges on the accessibility and livability of public space. However, the increasing privatization of public space in the United States has contributed to the implementation of anti‐homeless ordinances in cities, restricting sitting, standing, panhandling, and sleeping in public. This study analyzes data from interviews with housed and unhoused community members, text from a local policy document, and ethnographic observations to explore how boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” are drawn in public space and mediated through individual discourse. Our findings suggest that boundaries of exclusion are constructed through dominant narratives that portray the unhoused as a threat to safety and economic vitality, thus justifying the need for regulation and punishment through the criminalization of homelessness. Yet, informants also demonstrate resistance to this narrative by discussing how criminalization of homelessness perpetuates dehumanization, violence, and economic inequality. Policy implications for the regulation of public space are discussed.     

Regulating emotion and identity by narrating harm

This study examined how narration of harm experiences can regulate self and emotions in ways relevant to well-being. Participants (n = 88, 65% female) were asked to provide 6 narratives about instances when they were victims of harm and 6 narratives about instances when they were perpetrators of harm. Narratives were coded for extent of exploration, growth, damage conclusions and resolution. Participants drew damage conclusions more frequently in victim narratives and growth conclusions more frequently in perpetrator narratives. Both the type of experience (victim or perpetrator) and the way the experience was narrated (references to damage conclusions and resolution) predicted emotion and identity implications, which were, in turn, related to well-being. Implications for narrative approaches to self-regulation are discussed.