The Role and Function of Autobiographical Memory Narratives during the Emotional Processing of Breast Cancer Treatment: An Empirically-Derived Memory Coding System.

Breast cancer (BC) in younger age is a critical and potentially traumatic experience that can interrupt the continuity of self-narrative during a crucial phase. In the Narrative Identity framework the translation of memories into autobiographical narratives is an internal and external process that plays a key role in meaning-making, social relationships and self-coherence. The aim of this study is to examine the role and function that autobiographical memory narratives (AMN) play in the process of adaptation to BC medical treatment. Seventeen BC women below 50 years received prompts to provide autobiographical memory narratives at four phases during their treatment (pre-hospitalization-T1-post-surgery-T2-chemo-radio therapy-T3-follow-up-T4). The Emotional Processing Scale (EPS) was also administered. In all, 68 AMN were collected. A three step procedure of data analysis was conducted. The first one, an empirically-derived memory coding manual to analyze key dimensions of AMN was developed: Agency; Emotional Regulation and Interpersonal Relations. Findings show a particular vulnerability in narrative identity faced by BC women during the shift from T1-T3. In the second one, an emotional coping profile for each woman focusing on the shift from T1-T3 was created. For the third step, these profiles were compared with the EPS scores. The final results suggest the capacity of the AMNs to differentiate the women's emotional adaptation over the course of the BC treatment. Despite the study's limitations, it supports the use of AMN as clinical device to construct a deeper knowledge and profiling trajectory of how women have internalized and elaborated past encounters with illness and help providers, as well as their prior experience of bodily/psychological health and integrity. This information adds to an understanding of their current efforts at recovery and adaptation. In this way we believe that the recollection of narrative memories, not only at the end of the cancer treatment but also during its process, could help the women to mend the broken continuity of their narrative self, as they seek to maintain a healthy balance of internal resources across their past, present, and projected future.

Self-defining memories and past academic stress in Chinese and American college students: a replication and extension of Wang and Singer (2021).

The current study replicated Wang and Singer's ([2021]. A cross-cultural study of self-defining memories in Chinese and American college students. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.622527) finding that Chinese college students from the People's Republic of China (PRC) recalled more self-defining memories (SDMs) focused on high school academic stress than their American counterparts. Seventy-eight American students from a private 4-year liberal arts college and 96 Chinese students from 13 different Chinese universities recalled two SDMs and rated them for affect, recall frequency, and importance. Once again, Chinese college students were more likely than American students to recall academic stress SDMs, but also expressed more redemptive themes in these memories. Overall, Chinese students rated their SDMs as more positive than the Americans, while the American sample tended to recall their negative memories more frequently. Contrasting the SDMs, American students self-reported higher levels of stress about their high school workload and less academic self-confidence. Regressions linked more negative affect in American SDMs to these work load and self-confidence concerns. Chinese students' SDM negative affect was most strongly predicted by perceived academic stress linked to parental and teachers' expectations. The discussion highlights the potential influence of Confucian values in the Chinese students' responses to past academic stress and their internalisation of academic stress memories in their narrative identity.

Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue.

This Special Issue of Journal of Personality, focused on psychobiographies of social change agents, aims to make contributions to the field in terms of content, method, and process. The content of the issue is focused on understanding people who powerfully impact their world, from eminent global leaders to everyday change agents. The contributions to the Special Issue are unified by their adoption of psychobiographical methods, though as a set they offer both excellent representations of common psychobiographical approaches as well as vital innovations in this tradition. The process of curating this Special Issue sought to make several interventions in typical practices, including the cultivation of an intentional community of scholars representing both experienced and fledgling psychobiographers, the pursuit of a relational approach to publishing, and the adoption of open science practices. Psychobiography has an important role to play in contemporary personality psychology and we hope this Special Issue will itself serve as a foundation for continued innovation in the field.

Self-defining memories-Narrative features in relation to adaptive and maladaptive personality traits (replication and extension of Blagov & Singer, 2004).

OBJECTIVE: Self-defining memories (SDMs) are units of life-story analysis, whose features resemble elements from narrative identity's factorial structure. To bridge narrative-identity and personality-trait domains, we conducted a replication and extension of prior research. METHOD: We linked four SDM features - affect, specificity, meaning making, and content - to the Big Three trait domains of personality and psychopathology in a small sample that was well-powered for multilevel modeling (133 participants, 1330 SDMs). RESULTS: Affect SDM affect correlated with indices of Positive Emotionality and Negative Emotionality, and narrative themes of contamination were associated with Negative Emotionality. Specificity SDM specificity vs. overgenerality related to Constraint and Negative Emotionality indices, lending support to the executive dysfunction and emotional disorder theories of overgeneral autobiographical memory. (Tests of the avoidance thesis of overgeneral memory were inconclusive.) Meaning making Explicit meaning making in SDMs reflected adaptive personality. It moderated (or buffered) the link between SDMs' affect and chronic emotional distress. Content The links between SDM content and traits suggest that SDMs reflect personal goals, whose fulfillment or frustration relate to psychological health. CONCLUSIONS: This research serves replication purposes as well as the purpose of connecting two major domains of personality: narrative identity and adaptive and maladaptive traits.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Self-Defining Memories in Chinese and American College Students.

Self-defining memories (SDMs) are touchstones in individuals' narrative identity. This is the first SDM study to compare college students from the mainland People's Republic of China (PRC) to American college students. It examined SDMs, Big Five personality traits, and memory function in 60 students from each country (n = 120). Participants rated their memories for affect, recall frequency, and importance. Chinese students recalled their most positively rated memories more frequently and with greater importance, while American students did not show this pattern. American students who scored higher in Openness were more likely to recall negative memories. Memory content coding revealed that Chinese students recalled significantly more guilt/shame events than American students. Further analysis indicated that these memories were particularly focused on academic performance and parental expectations. The discussion suggests that follow-up studies look at differing emotion regulation strategies in the two countries, as well as at how the two different educational systems are affecting late adolescent identity formation processes.

A Three-Domain Personality Analysis of a Mentally Tough Athlete.

The current study adopted McAdams' multilayer framework as the basis to develop a psychological portrait of an elite athlete who was identified as being particularly 'mentally tough'. The aim was to use this single case as an exemplar to demonstrate the utility of McAdams' framework for understanding the complexity of sport performers across three domains of personality: dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity. We operationalised these domains through the development of specific research questions and, subsequently, the collection and integration of the participant's Big Five traits, personal strivings, coping strategies, and response to a life story interview. The results offered a comprehensive insight into the nature of one athlete's personality that, in turn, informed conceptual perspectives of mental toughness in sport psychology literature and qualitatively supported emerging evidence of the validity of a three-layer framework in personality psychology. Specifically, the study's design showed how a holistic approach to personality analysis can lead to a more complete psychological representation of competitors in sport, and people generally. It demonstrated how motivational, sociocultural, and meaning-making aspects of personality can complement a trait profile to achieving a satisfying assessment of the whole person.

The tales athletes tell: Narrative structure and identity in Great British medalists.

Using a life story approach, Hardy and colleagues present a study examining the similarities and differences in the psychosocial development of UK-based elite and super-elite athletes. We found this work to be a highly personal account into the lives of these cohorts, which advances knowledge concerning the psychology and influencing events and circumstances that separate the good from the great performers. We make some suggestions for how to enrich the study's findings and approach, by (1) adopting McAdams' multilayer framework of personality, as an overarching structure for assessing the whole person, and (2) encouraging the authors to explore the narrative structure of the presented life stories and go beyond simply an interpretation of their content.

Coding "We-ness" in couple's relationship stories: A method for assessing mutuality in couple therapy.

OBJECTIVE: "We-ness," a couple's mutual investment in their relationship and in each other, has been found to be a potent dimension of couple resilience. This study examined the development of a method to capture We-ness in psychotherapy through the coding of relationship narratives co-constructed by couples ("We-Stories"). It used a coding system to identify the core thematic elements that make up these narratives. METHOD: Couples that self-identified as "happy" (N = 53) generated We-Stories and completed measures of relationship satisfaction and mutuality. These stories were then coded using the We-Stories coding manual. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Findings indicated that security, an element that involves aspects of safety, support, and commitment, was most common, appearing in 58.5% of all narratives. This element was followed by the elements of pleasure (49.1%) and shared meaning/vision (37.7%). The number of "We-ness" elements was also correlated with and predictive of discrepancy scores on measures of relationship mutuality, indicating the validity of the We-Stories coding manual. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

Self-defining memories, scripts, and the life story: narrative identity in personality and psychotherapy.

An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long-term self to generate autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life-story memories, which in turn become self-defining memories when linked to an individual's enduring concerns. Self-defining memories that share repetitive emotion-outcome sequences yield narrative scripts, abstracted templates that filter cognitive-affective processing. The life story is the individual's overarching narrative that provides unity and purpose over the life course. Healthy narrative identity combines memory specificity with adaptive meaning-making to achieve insight and well-being, as demonstrated through a literature review of personality and clinical research, as well as new findings from our own research program. A clinical case study drawing on this narrative identity model is also presented with implications for treatment and research.

Reconsidering therapeutic action: Loewald, cognitive neuroscience and the integration of memory's duality.

Both Loewald's relational theory of memory and the Self-Memory System (SMS) of cognitive neuroscience describe a dual memory system, one system that is experience-near sensory-perceptual, and the other, symbolic and conceptual. In contrast to perspectives that locate therapeutic action in either altering implicit procedural memories or interpreting explicit historical content, we argue that psychological health emerges from effective integration of both memory systems, achieved through a combination of transference dynamics and analytic insight. We support this position by elaborating four key assumptions of the loewaldian and SMS perspectives, followed by application to a clinical example. We highlight the power of certain integrative autobiographical memories called 'self-defining memories' in assisting an understanding of transference dynamics and providing metaphoric touchstones to guide subsequent treatment.

A loss in the family: silence, memory, and narrative identity after bereavement.

Grief theories have converged on the idea that the sharing of autobiographical memory narratives of loss and of the deceased person, especially within the family, is a major way to maintain and/or reconfigure a healthy sense of identity after a loss. In contrast, we examine unspoken memory-the withholding of socially sharing autobiographical memories about the loss and the departed family member-as a way to either conserve an existing narrative identity or assert a new narrative identity. Depending on its context and function, silence about memory can play either a positive or negative role in an individual griever's ongoing narrative identity, as well as in the larger family narrative in which the griever's identity is embedded.

Four dimensions of self-defining memories (specificity, meaning, content, and affect) and their relationships to self-restraint, distress, and repressive defensiveness.

This study examines four dimensions of self-defining memory (specificity, meaning, content, and affect) and their relationship to self-restraint, distress, and defensiveness. The development and validation of a protocol for measuring specificity, meaning, and affect in self-defining memories is discussed. Specificity is operationalized as the temporal and detailed specificity of the narrative. Meaning refers to the participant's stepping back from the narrative to derive higher personal meaning or a life lesson. Affect reflects subjective emotion upon recall. Agreement between two raters scoring 1040 memories was kappa=.83 for specificity and kappa=.72 for meaning. The protocol is compatible with Thorne and McLean's scoring system for content (the types of events in memories). The current study compared individual differences in the four dimensions of 10 self-defining memories collected from 103 undergraduates to scores of self-restraint, distress, and repressive defensiveness, as measured by the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory. Memory specificity was inversely related to repressive defensiveness, while greater memory meaning was linked to moderate and high levels of self-restraint. Memory content and affect predicted individuals' degree of subjective distress. Based on these findings, the authors discuss the place of self-defining memories in Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's Self-Memory System model of autobiographical memory and personality, more generally.

The myth of individualism-collectivism: a critical review.

The authors critically assess the dimension of individualism-collectivism (I-C) and its various uses in cross-cultural psychology. They argue that I-C research is characterized largely by insufficient conceptual clarity and a lack of systematic data. As a result, they call into question the utility of I-C as an explanatory tool for cultural variation in behavior, suggest alternative dimensions for cross-cultural research, and interpret the weaknesses of research on I-C as illustrative of a general trend in social psychology.