Narrative DevelopmentStudying Narrative It is now widely accepted that memory is never an exact reproduction of experience (Stein & Liwag, 1997). For people trying to make sense of stressful experiences, constructing a narrative is as important as what is reported to have actually happened (Bruner , 1994). Narratives often emerge during the course of therapy (Harvey, Orbuch, Chwalisz and Garwood ,1991; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995; Meichenbaum & Fitzpatrick, 1993) and increased narrative development is linked to better therapeutic outcomes (Foa,1995). There is abundant clinical data and theory suggesting that integrating a stressful experience into a coherent account ends or diminishes the intrusive thinking that often follows traumatic events (Silver, Boon & Stones, 1983; Greenberg, 1995; Creamer, 1995). Pennebaker and Seegal (1999) have argued that narrative development "repackages" the fragmented memories of stressful events so that their accessibility is diminished and their recall becomes more a matter of deliberate retrieval. Being able to compose a story about a stressful experience presumably reduces the size and complexity of the original experience into a smaller unit that "lets memory work less hard" and "provides a constancy of lessons to be learned that does not need to be constantly reexamined" (Schank & Abelson ,1995 p. 42). Schank and Abelson argue that creating a narrative about bad experiences weakens their accessibility and lessens the likelihood that internal or external stimuli will activate them. Memories that are not activated do not require cognitive resources either for further processing or inhibition. Encouraging narrative development The first challenge faced in experimental studies of peoples' stories about their stressful experiences is convincing them to produce a narrative about the experience. The technique we use, the expressive writing paradigm, was developed by James Pennebaker (1985). Experimental participants are randomly assigned either to write about a traumatic or stressful event or about a trivial topic. The instructions for the former group emphasize the importance of developing an understanding of the event by tying feelings and thoughts about the event together. This manipulation has been used with many different populations and consistently (Pennebaker, 1997; Smythe , 1999) results in better health outcomes for individuals asked to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings about a stressful experience. We have recently submitted a manuscript reporting two experiments in which expressive writing produced increases in working memory capacity. Assessing the degree of narrative development
Analysing the products of expressive writers is a
second challenge for researchers in this area. In our lab we have employed
two techniques. One is Pennebaker and
Francis' Linguistic Interpreter and Word Count (1999; LIWC)
program and the other is a coding scheme developed for us by Susan
Katz (1999) at North Carolina State University. LIWC is a text analysis
program that counts words belonging to 72 different linguistic categories,
such as negative emotions, first person pronouns etc. In the Katz holistic
scoring system, trained coders score each essay for its degree of narrative,
Gricean, lexical and overall coherence.
ReferencesBruner, J. (1994). The remembered self. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush (Eds.), The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative (pp.41-54). NY: Cambridge University Press.Pennebaker, J. W. & Francis, M. (1999). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum |
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