Envisioning motherhood: Mental-state language in caregiving narratives across the perinatal period

Nancy Suchman's work highlighted the fundamental role of maternal mentalization in maternal addiction, mental health, and caregiving challenges. In this study, we aimed to examine the role of mental-state language (MSL) as a measure of mentalization in prenatal and postnatal narratives and their sentiment in a sample of 91 primarily White mothers from the western United States, followed from the second trimester of pregnancy, through the third trimester, to 4 months postpartum. Specifically, we investigated the use of affective and cognitive MSL in prenatal narratives when mothers visualized caring for their baby and postnatal narratives when mothers compared their prenatal visualization to the current caregiving reality. Results indicated moderate consistency in MSL between the second and third trimesters, but prenatal and postnatal MSL was not significantly correlated. Across all time points, higher use of MSL was related to more positive sentiment, indicating an association between mentalization and positive caregiving representations across the perinatal period. Women used more affective than cognitive MSL in prenatal imagination of caregiving, but this pattern was reversed in their postpartum reflection. Implications on assessing parental mentalization prenatally and considering the relative dominance of affective and cognitive mentalizing are discussed while considering study limitations.     

Effects of models and demonstrations of personal narratives on the use of lexical ties by writers with mental retardation

A single subject reversal design was used to investigate the effects of two methods for teaching writing to eight adolescents with mild or moderate mental retardation during a weekly process writing workshop. During each workshop, each student wrote a personal narrative while the teacher circulated among the group and provided positive verbal feedback and spelled words on request. Students' texts were later typed with corrected spelling and punctuation and returned to them with verbal praise before the next writing workshop. During the first experimental condition, the subjects listened to an exemplar text selected by the teacher. In the second phase, the teacher read a narrative she had written as the exemplar text. During the third experimental condition, the teacher orally self-instructed herself through steps in writing a narrative. The subjects' texts were analyzed for number of words written and number and type of lexical ties used to produce cohesion between sentences in a text. The model narrative produced the best gains in the number of words written by the poorer readers, while the demonstration improved the cohesiveness of their texts. The better readers and writers wrote more cohesively during the model narrative and produced longer text during the demonstration condition.     

‘Outdoing Lewis Carroll’: Judicial Rhetoric and Acceptable Fictions

This paper examines the functions of narrative within legal argumentation. My purposes are these: 1) to repudiate common assumptions that differentiate argumentation and storytelling in the law; 2) to begin to theorize anew how legal argumentation functions; 3) to explore the difficulties of evaluating the law's argumentative narratives; and 4) to trace some of the anxiety that judges themselves reveal about their roles as storytellers. I conclude that narrative is necessary to law's claims to authority, even as it complicates our understandings about how legislative policy decisions produce effects, and even as judges themselves seek to mask its importance.     

Everything you wanted to know about redemptive stories* (*but were afraid to ask)

Life stories organize personal experiences within broad temporal frameworks. Stories that are redemptive in nature progress from negative beginnings to positive endings. Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the tendency for individuals to both understand their lives using story-based principles and evoke redemptive imagery while so doing. Here, I consider the past (foundations), present (extant literature), and future (directions and controversies) of psychology’s redemptive story. Previously, work on redemptive stories has been informed by several theoretical vantages and analytic approaches. Currently, a sizable literature has emerged examining redemptive stories in relation to a number of processes and outcomes. In future, it will be crucial to explore moderations in these relations as well as redemption’s causal nature.     

Examining the narrative roles in suicide notes

The present study examines suicide notes, using a sample of suicide notes from published corpora (N = 50), combined with a sample of recent suicide notes from a suicide website (N = 50). The present study proposes a model of differentiation in completed suicides. The characteristics of the suicide notes were analysed using a content dictionary developed by Giles in 2007, and the data subjected to smallest space analysis. Four themes of suicide completer were discovered: Egoistic Victim, Anomic Hero, Altruistic Professional and Fatalistic Revenger. The implications of these findings and the potential use in therapy work with suicide survivors and those with suicidal ideation are discussed, as well as suggestions for the direction of future research.     

Dualism and its Importance for Medicine

Cartesian dualism has been viewed by medical theorists to be oneof the chief causes of a reductionist/mechanistic treatment ofthe patient. Although I aver that Cartesian dualism is one culprit for the misapprehension of the genuine treatment of patients in termsof both mind and body, I argue that interactive dualism whichstresses the interaction of mind and body is essential to treatpatients with dignity and compassion. Thus, adequate medical carethat is humanistic in nature is difficult (if not impossible)to achieve without physicians adhering to a dualistic frameworkin which the body and person is treated during illness.     

Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa: the politics of representation and a liberatory community psychology

Peace accords and international interventions have contributed to the suspension of armed conflict and the censuring of repressive regimes in many parts of the world. Some governments and their opposition parties have agreed to the establishment of commissions or other bodies designed to create historical records of the violations of human rights and foster conditions that facilitate reparatory and reconciliatory processes. This paper explores selected roles that community psychologists have played in this process of remembering the past and constructing new identities towards creating a more just future. With reference to two community groups (in Guatemala and South Africa) we show how efforts to speak out about one's own experiences of political and military repression involve complex representational politics that go beyond the simple binary opposition of silencing versus giving voice. The Guatemalan group consisted of Mayan Ixil women who, together with the first author, used participatory action research and the PhotoVoice technique to produce a book about their past and present struggles. The South African group, working within the ambit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in collaboration with the third author and others, explored ways of speaking about their roles in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Although both these initiatives can be seen as moments in on-going struggles to overcome externally-imposed repressive practices that censor the voices of marginalized communities, they also serve to dispel overly romanticized notions of univocal communities now liberated to express themselves in an unmediated and unequivocal fashion. The paper discusses how each group of women instead entered into subtly nuanced relationships with community psychologists involving a continual interplay between the authenticity of their self-representational accounts and the requirements of the discursive technologies into which they were being inducted and the material conditions within their sites of struggle. In both cases the group's agenda also evolved over time, so that what emerged was not so much a particular account of themselves, or even the development of a particular voice for speaking about themselves, but an unfolding process—for the groups and for the community psychologists who accompanied them—of becoming active players in the postmodern, mediated world of self-representational politics and social struggle.     

Towards a symbol literacy approach in the education of children

Abstract

Children enter a world that is full of symbols, most of which have become inaccessible. This is true not only because of a positivistic attitude that views analogical truth as nonsensical, but also because of the fragmentation that we experience. This situation is impoverishing children’s awareness, connectedness as well as their ability to access and express existential concerns and the answers different generations have tried to provide. It is for this reason that children need to learn a variety of symbols and the ‘grammar’ of how they form meaning. A symbolic literacy approach not only helps them to read symbols but also enables them to formulate meaning and to connect with the deeper reality and facilitates their ability to transcend physical reality. The paper will also refer to the development of an interdisciplinary pedagogy and its implementation through a project that is being done in collaboration with Maltese primary schools.     

Becoming Eastern Orthodox in diaspora: materializing Orthodox Russia and Holy Rus’

In this article, I draw on interviews and participant observation data from a two-year-long ethnographic study in a Russian Orthodox parish in the United States. I argue that both the Russian Orthodox immigrants and the Protestant converts to Orthodoxy attending this parish may be usefully thought of as diasporic groups. Seeking to construct their particular Orthodox identity, both groups deal with their own physical and symbolic displacements, and attempt to find their place of belonging. I demonstrate how in the process, through reliance on religious narratives, prayer, and Russian Orthodox icons, parishioners construct two overlapping, yet distinctive places of their origin: Holy Rus’ and Orthodox Russia. Finally, attending to how some Orthodox Christians were able to position themselves in two groups simultaneously, I suggest that we think of religious practitioners as able to inhabit two diasporas at once.