What Do We Have When We Have a Narrative?

Abstract

This review introduces our special issue, which presents a variety of papers with explicit assumptions of how narrative methods are used in cognitive and personality psychology studies of autobiographical narratives. We begin this review with an examination of how narrative is conceptualized in terms of reflecting and influencing a sense of self that is sculpted via social interaction. After explicating these constructs more carefully, we turn to an analysis of narrative methods, examining how different methodologies of narrative coding take on certain assumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, regarding narrative, self, and social interaction.

Keywords

narrative methodology autobiographical memory personality self

Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 216)

Across numerous disciplines in the human sciences, the “narrative turn” of the last few decades (Vassilieva, 2016) has led to a surge in studies of a narrative mode of thinking, which emphasizes people’s interpretation of experiences in coherent, structured, stories (Bruner, 1986; McAdams, 1996; Polkinghorne, 1988; Taylor, 1989). It suggests that storytelling is essential to human nature and has led to the proposal that homo narrans be used as a root metaphor for humans (Fisher, 1984). The focus of the special issue is on better understanding how narrative is conceptualized and employed by psychology researchers, that is, to better understand what one has when one has narrative data. This understanding will raise awareness of the different approaches that researchers take, which will engender a better understanding of the potential uses of narrative methods and the utility of narrative data.

We use the term narrative in this paper and this issue to refer to autobiographical narratives. By this, we mean first-person renderings of life experiences. These narratives are commonly (but not necessarily) shared with others and commonly (but not necessarily) include reports of actions, events, or other episodic details alongside interpretive elements where the narrator explains the intentions, thoughts, and feelings of self and potentially others in the narrative (see Bruner, 1990; Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Pasupathi, Mansfield, & Weeks, 2014; Reese et al., 2011).

In very broad terms, researchers in psychology appear to approach narratives in one of two ways. Narratives are either windows on cognition and personality or narratives are mechanisms of development. When researchers approach narratives as a window, they tend to use narrated content to draw conclusions about memory for events or about how aspects of personality (e.g., neuroticism) lead people to particular types of interpretations. The value of narrative is primarily in what it reveals about the psychological workings of individuals at a given point in time. As a developmental mechanism, the focus turns to how the dynamic process of interpreting experience and constructing knowledge ensues from the existing characteristics that one has in a given developmental and cultural context as well as how interpreting experience and constructing knowledge feeds forward to shape the self, memory, and understanding life’s events.

We begin our introduction to this special issue with two fundamental notions that are associated with the narrative-as-window and narrative-as-process metaphors: Narratives provide meaning for selfhood and narratives are socially shared. Relatedly, our contributors to the special issue address theoretical topics, such as how the self is reflected in the content and themes of narratives and how the self is constructed in narratives (see especially Banks & Salmon; Dunlop; Liao, Bluck, & Westerhof; Pasupathi, Wainryb, Bourne, & Posada, this issue). Self is, of course, one of the classic organizing concepts in the field of psychology (James, 1890; Leary & Tangney, 2012). Thus, a broad array of elements fall under the term selfhood including, but not limited to, relatively enduring traits (sociability), roles that the self inhabits (husband), evaluations of the self (self-esteem), and motivational elements (feared and hoped for possible selves; Pasupathi, et al., 2014) and some of these concepts are represented in the contributions to this special issue. Regarding sharing, we consider whether sharing event narratives shapes the way events are recalled, structured, and turned into meaningful representations by considering the act of conversation and the role of culture and time (see Fivush, Booker, & Graci; Köber, Weihofen, & Rennstich; Wang, Song, & Koh; Pasupathi, et al., this issue).

Finally another assumption of ours, which drove the creation of this special issue, is that one’s theoretical stance toward narrative has methodological implications for how narratives are used. Along with recent works (e.g., Syed & Nelson, 2015), we hoped to shed further light on the complex relationship between theory and methods in this special issue. To this end, some contributions focus closely on narrative methodology itself (see especially Alea; Holm & Thomsen; Panattoni & McLean, this issue).

In the pages that follow, we review research in three sections with an eye toward revealing underlying assumptions about narrative and setting the stage for the special issue. The first two sections examine how social interaction and self, respectively, influence and are influenced by narrative. After explicating these more carefully, we turn to a brief analysis of narrative methods, considering how different methodologies of narrative coding take on certain assumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, regarding narrative, self, and social interaction. Although we present social interaction and narrative in one section and self and narrative in another, we recognize that the three are highly intertwined. Indeed, we believe that how scholars understand these relations depends on theoretical perspective and conceptualization of variables. It is those underlying theoretical perspectives and conceptualizations that we hope to make plain in this special issue by giving authors more space than they often have to discuss these topics.

Narrative and Social Interaction

In this section, we examine the role of social interaction in autobiographical narratives. We consider social processes integral to understanding these narratives and want to shed light on the different ways in which this may be the case. A central function of autobiographical memory is sharing these narratives to build intimacy and convey life lessons (Bluck, Alea, Habermas, & Rubin, 2005; Webster & McCall, 1999); as such, we raise the question of how social interaction and narrative interrelate, considering numerous perspectives from previous literature and from the contributors to this special issue.

Wainryb and Recchia (2014) suggested that the linguistic representation (i.e., narrative) necessary for spoken social interaction requires an individual to add structure to an event memory, pushing the individual to integrate the event into a sense of personal history more so than might occur in private reflection, allowing for the extraction of complex meaning. As such, narrative organization is an internal process that is the product of social interaction. Many researchers go further, raising questions about the extent to which social interaction is an integral, or even inseparable, aspect of defining autobiographical memories and their narrative structure. We outline three streams of thinking on this topic in the following sections, progressing from models that emphasize the influence of social interaction on an individualized process to models that challenge the validity of an individualized memory process because of the pervasive social influences on memory.

Narrative Structure as Developed via Social Interaction

According to the sociocultural model (Nelson & Fivush, 2004), narrative brings together multiple developing skills, such as episodic memory, theory of mind, and a cognitive sense of self. Language enables conversations through which the developing child learns to structure these varied skills into a meaningful event memory. As Nelson and Fivush (2004, p. 490) write:

Experience with different forms of narrative, in play, in stories, and especially in talk about personal episodes, provides a model for organizing one’s own episodic memories into the kind of narratives that emphasize personhood, motivations, goals, outcomes, emotions, and values. Practice with this organization has a two-sided outcome: The child learns to tell about personal experience in the social forms valued by the community and acquires a more coherent form that aids in the retention of a whole episode, and not just fragments of scenes.

According to this model, then, narrative is a cultural tool in Vygotsky’s (1962) sense that children have some existing skills and learn via social interaction to combine them into a coherent unit. This model has been supported by extensive longitudinal results showing that maternal elaboration style in memory conversations predicts children’s memory production years later (e.g., Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1996) that infant amnesia is characterized by a gradual emergence linked to maternal elaboration (Harley & Reese, 1999) and training in elaborations for mothers correlates to earlier first memories in adolescents nearly 10 years later (Reese, Jack, & White, 2010). It has further been used as a fruitful means of explaining cross-cultural (Wang, 2003) and gender differences in AM (Autobiographical Memory; Pillemer, 1998; Grysman & Hudson, 2013). These lines of research emphasize that parents’ early conversations shape the way children’s memory narratives are structured. Wang et al. (this issue) emphasize that these cultural forces should not be underestimated and that in addition to emerging early in ontogeny, they remain present in dynamic interactions throughout the lifespan and exert their influences at encoding, storage, and retrieval. However, Wainryb and Recchia’s (2014) approach suggests that simply anticipating a conversation is enough for social interaction to influence narrative thinking, other sociocultural approaches focus more on skill development via conversation; social sharing teaches a child how to think about events in memory.

Pasupathi (2001) expands to adulthood the core assumption that memory is a skill held by the individual and shaped by social interactions. Using the term coconstruction, she outlines multiple ways in which the social context can influence event memory structure. These ways include goals for how to retell the event, questions, real or anticipated, asked by listeners, ways to adjust the narrative to the knowledge of listeners, and finally, how collaborative recall, such as with family, friends, or romantic partners, can shift the way an event is recalled. In all these scenarios, narrative shifts with the goals of the telling context and feedback from listeners. This approach strengthens the point that social interaction does not need an actual conversation to wield influence and emphasizes that the sociocultural structuring provided by conversations is a lifelong process, not limited to early childhood.

Pasupathi et al. (this issue) show how such collaborative contexts can influence the development of moral agency by considering samples of two different North American cultures and a group of displaced Colombian youth. They emphasize the power that victim and perpetrator narratives can have in developing moral agency, but that their role depends on youths’ exposure to violence, which can create different contexts in which narratives of harm are considered.

Narrative Memory as Inseparable From Social Interaction

Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers? We see no reason why not, in principle (Clark & Chalmers, 1998, p. 17)

A related approach considers the possibility that narrative memory resides in the dynamic interaction between individuals (see Sutton, Harris, Keil, & Barnier, 2010), whereas Pasupathi (2001) emphasized how social interaction can change the content of an individual’s event representation, this program questions if the individual is the most appropriate level of analysis for an understanding of memory or if memory is more accurately defined as an emergent property of many individuals and interactions. In this sense, social interaction plays a constitutive role in defining narrative memory, rather than an influential role on an independent process.

This approach to social interaction is supported by multiple lines of evidence in the cognitive literature: in socially shared retrieval induced forgetting (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007), the responses of a listener reinforce some aspects of the information being shared, leaving fewer resources available for others (see Hirst & Echterhoff, 2012); in collaborative inhibition, people recall less in groups than they otherwise would alone (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & Thomas, 1997); in social contagion of memory (Roediger, Meade, & Bergman, 2001), people adopt details reported by someone else who shared the experience with them. In more direct applications to narrative methods, Harris, Keil, Sutton, Barnier, and McIlwain (2011) interviewed older couples who reported about shared events both individually and together. They found that joint reports were emotionally richer and more detailed than individual reports. Pasupathi and Hoyt (2009) found that adolescents used more interpretive content in their memory narratives when speaking with an attentive (vs. distracted) listener. Taken together, these findings raise questions about how to interpret a memory narrative as a form of data. Because events are often experienced and shared with others, and because the sharing process can have such a formative influence on what is told, how it is told, and how it is subsequently recalled, the notion of isolating a pure and individualized memory narrative distinct from the social sphere may be methodologically impossible and fundamentally inaccurate. Köber et al. (this issue) point to the patterns of narrating among Congolese participants describing their interactions with White Europeans. The authors note the correlations between narrative content of closure and contamination with socially distant attitudes toward the outgroup and consider the difficulty in separating the personal narrative structure from the cultural milieu that engenders social distance.

In this vein, Wegner (1987) referred to the “transactive memory system,” noting our reliance on others in memory, often based on their expertise or our relationships with them. Importantly, though, the information that another contributes to memory recall is not static as in a book or external hard drive, making a system that is more dynamic than the sum of the individuals involved. In personal narratives, this model is most strongly felt when considering intimate relationships. Sharing memories becomes so common within a couple and with others while in the presence of the partner that one individual may come to rely on the partner for some details, devoting less energy to encoding and sharing them. Examining a personal narrative without the partner may lose ecological validity, suggesting that narratives for some events are more complete in the presence of the transactive system than in the hands of only one member. However, studies emphasizing these social influences rarely employ autobiographical memory narrative data, and the application of these models to autobiographical memory narratives, though fraught with methodological challenges, would greatly enhance an understanding of social interaction in autobiographical memory.

How do Social Interaction Findings Shift Our Conceptualization of Memory?

Social interaction findings raise the question of what an autobiographical narrative is fundamentally. Bamberg (Bamberg & Demuth, 2016) argues that memory that emerges in conversation is so dependent on social interaction that it is not a good representation of the initial experience that it is describing. Although not the prevailing view represented in this special issue, we believe that highlighting this perspective is an important step in examining the assumptions of the field. This view reveals important assumptions that may distinguish most psychologists from other fields regarding social construction. The prevailing view among the psychologists cited in this section is that the personal narrative is a window into a real cognitive process, albeit one that has been shaped by social, cultural, and transactive forces. Conversely, Bamberg’s view is emblematic of one held more broadly in other social sciences (see Brockmeier, 2015), namely, that the personal narrative provides a window into a real social and cultural process, but that it cannot provide meaningful information about cognition or about the individual who is simply enacting these social and cultural processes when narrating.

In an attempt to bridge these approaches, Brockmeier (2015) argues that the assumption of a real experience that is then shaped and interpreted via narrative processes is an inaccurate way of viewing autobiographical memory. Instead:

Neither our understanding of who we are nor our very existence in a cultural world can be separated from the stories that we and others tell about ourselves. In making sense of ourselves we do not start with events, experiences, memories, or what we take to be facts of our lives as a “given” and then construe narratives around them … We start with a story, or more precisely, with a number of stories, or fragments or traces of stories because we are born into, grow up, and live in the midst of a world of narratives that … for the most part are not our own. In this world, an event, experience, memory, or a fact can only be understood as a segment cut out of a narrative web, a web that would exist even without my actively being involved in weaving it. (Brockmeier, 2015, pp. 180–181).

The suggestion that a personal narrative is even partially independent of the individual is foreign to most psychologists and does not lend itself easily to empirical testing. However, some researchers are currently examining ways of separating the individual from collective aspects of personal memories. McLean, Pasupathi, Greenhoot, and Fivush (2016) examined personal event narratives of multiple events of a given type and compared variability by event type to intraindividual variability. They found some consistency within individuals, but event type captured at least as much variability. This finding suggests that a normative way of narrating certain event types may be as prominent as a given individual’s experience. We take this finding to support Brockmeier’s view, at least inasmuch as it notes that the simultaneous influences of individual experience and cultural structure cannot easily be separated in a personal event narrative.

In sum, we began this section by identifying social processes as central to understanding autobiographical narratives, but then progressed to consider various theoretical approaches to understanding how. We began with a highly individualized model (Wainryb & Recchia, 2014) in which the social-cognitive process of narrating influences the individual memory. From there, we considered various models of memory sharing, each of which gives greater prominence to the act of sharing and ended with one model that even questions the value of describing an individual process at all. We also note that for clarity of organization, we separated the “narrative and social interaction” section from the “narrative and self” section, yet we recognize the interdependence among the concepts.

Narrative and Self

Just as the role of social interaction in memory narratives is not clearly agreed upon, neither is the relationship between self and narrative. For example, a researcher’s relative emphasis on the importance of interactional processes when narrating mundane daily events versus the importance of making meanings about the self when narrating larger life events can indicate much about her assumptions regarding the relationship between narrative and self—the focus of the current section.

Conceptualizing Self

We draw on James’ notion of the Duplex Self (James, 1890) for a working definition of self and move through several more modern, yet interrelated approaches to conceptualizing the self. Consistent with classic theory (James, 1890), we see the self as being partly constituted by psychological processes that are central to apprehending and interpreting experiences (McAdams, 1996). The self as a psychological process is the self as a “knower” (James, 1890; Leary & Tangney, 2012; McAdams, 1996). Without the necessity of conscious direction, the self, as a process, automatically perceives and interprets ongoing experiences in the environment. Some cognitive psychologists have referred to this as the working self (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and have further argued that in addition to perception, the working self is responsible for monitoring the environment, establishing goals in the present moment, prioritizing them, and initiating goal-directed behaviors (Bluck, Alea, & Demiray, 2010; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Thus, the working self coordinates cognition, behavior, and emotion (Bluck et al., 2010). Likewise, the self, as a process, provides an existential base in the sense that, in McAdams’ (1996, p. 302) terms, “I exist; I am the source of my experience,” making the self as a process, or working self, firmly interfaced with changes in one’s environment, challenging situations, emotional events, demands of other social actors, and so on. (Bluck et al., 2010).

The self is also composed of the psychological products or outcomes of the processes described earlier. The self, as a product, is the self as “known” (Leary & Tangney, 2012; McAdams, 1996). It is the concept that the individual recognizes as indicative of “me,” such as how outgoing one believes that she is (i.e., personality traits), or that one recognizes as personally “my” own, such as the memory of one’s first kiss (i.e., part of an autobiographical store of memories) and one’s hopes and fears regarding meaningful future goals (i.e., personal concerns). In addition, in industrialized cultures, during adolescence when biological changes associated with sexual maturation and social expectations begin to push youth to form an identity, the beginnings of an autobiography of self emerge (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008). This emerging story of self provides evidence for how one has become the person that she is now and whom she wants to be in the future (e.g., Erikson, 1959). The autobiography is revised as one “selectively reconstructs his past in such a way that step for step it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it” (Erikson, 1959, p. 111, see also McAdams, 1990). In the best case, this malleable autobiography of self—this life story—imbues one’s life, and therefore the self, with a sense of unity and purpose (McAdams, 1990, 2003) as it integrates event memories into a coherent life story.

A related influential approach to self that is important to include here is work on the self-memory system (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004). It is important in the context of this special issue because the workings of autobiographical memory, though a key assumption, is not always made manifest in works on personality and narrative. From the perspective of the self-memory system paradigm, the major elements of the self should be influential in the construction of the life story or directly represented in the life story (Bluck et al., 2010; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). As described earlier, the working self should partially dictate what is included in the life story because it determines what is deemed relevant to the self as it is experienced and monitors situational goals and audience-relevant content in the dynamic process of narrating with others. Likewise, the long-term self will be represented in life story in two ways. One way is by organizing self-relevant information in the autobiographical knowledge base (Bluck et al., 2010; Bluck & Habermas, 2000); a second way is that abstract information surrounding the conceptual self, such as values, should be expressed in narrated content of the life story. One example is found in past research showing that people who hold generative values consistently create “stories of commitment” (McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997).

One of the main impulses of work in the narrative and personality literature revolves around understanding the relationship between self and narrative. Indeed, as we introduce next, many of the works in this special issue address this relationship.

Relations Between Narrative and Self

Narrative scholars emphasize the importance of the life story, the internalized evolving narrative of self (McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007). In general, they view the self as a permanent, stable aspect of personhood (McAdams, 1996, 2001; McLean et al., 2007; Pasupathi, 2015) as opposed to a fleeting, situationally dependent phenomenon (Gergen, 1991). For many psychologists, narrative meaning-making is one of the important processes by which the self and its concepts are constructed and maintained (e.g., Dunlop & Walker, 2013; McLean et al., 2007). Moreover, key works in the field of memory and self argue that one of the primary functions of remembering and interpreting the personal past in storied form is for a sense of self-continuity (Baddeley, 1988; Bluck & Habermas, 2000).

Self-continuity is likely supported when people make similar interpretations about self across experiences. Furthermore, to the extent that there exists a system of associated memories from which beliefs about the self arise, how a person narrates each new self-relevant experience is dependent on the interpretations about the self that he or she stored from past narrated experiences. Thus, narrative and self may be considered reciprocally influential. By reciprocally influential, we mean that, on the one hand, in the act of narrating, a person expresses currently held views about the self, but simultaneously reinforces those views either in the way the story is told or in how it is reaffirmed or altered by a listener. What is reinforced or altered has the potential to prospectively influence one’s self-concept (for further discussion of this relationship see McLean et al., 2007; Pasupathi et al., 2014).

However, as Pasupathi et al. have argued (2014) the best evidence for a reciprocal relationship between narrative and self would be found in prospective longitudinal data. A study by Pals (2006) provides such evidence for the assumed reciprocal relationship between narrative and self. Pals found that among divorced women who were 61 years old, those who were more open to complex thoughts and feelings associated with negative experiences (i.e., coping openness) at the age of 21 had higher levels of ego maturity at the age of 61 but that relationship was partially mediated by the extent to which participants deeply explored, reflected on, and analyzed (i.e., exploratory narrative processing) the implications of their most negative life event in narratives written at age 52. This study suggests that aspects of self and ways of narrating may coevolve in reciprocally influential ways.

McAdams (e.g., 1996; 2013) has established perhaps the most influential contemporary view of self-structure employed by narrative personality scholars. McAdams and Cox (2010) have theorized that the author self, which has developmental roots in early family reminiscing practices yet comes to the fore in adolescence, is layered over continuously amassed knowledge about the kind of social actor (e.g., outgoing, shy, kind) and motivated agent (e.g., the types of goals that prioritize actions) the person has been, is, and anticipates becoming in the future. In this issue, Dunlop partially draws on this perspective and proposes that people have multiple internalized and somewhat distinct life stories that are elicited in distinct life contexts. These contextualized life stories then contribute to the generalized life story that has often been the focus of studies on narrative identity. His model may promote questions and research projects designed to understand how self retains unity across changing environmental contexts and social situations.

Via conarration, or joint storytelling, the child learns meaning-making skills from parents and others and slowly establishes a sense of self that is protracted in time yet unified. Nelson has called this the continuing me (2001). In explicating how the continuing me develops, Nelson (2001) and Fivush (2001) have argued that the experiencing actor, the “I” (the knower), comes to represent what is “me” (the known) through stories about his or her own self’s past, present, and anticipated future experiences. These narrative experiences matter because they help the child apprehend that he, the storyteller, is the same child today who was at the zoo yesterday and who will be having a birthday party soon. They help create a representation of the self across time and they contribute to autobiographical memory development (Nelson, 2001).

Extending these ideas, yet consistent with the view that self and narrative processes are reciprocally related, Fivush, Booker, and Graci (this issue) argue that narrated events should be understood as nested within both developmental time and processing time. According to this view, developmental time sets limits on how an event may be significant for the self. This is because at different developmental periods, we have different meaning-making skills. Yet, events in developmental time matter because they may push individuals to new higher levels of meaning-making skill. Moreover, processing time, time since an event’s occurrence, is nested within developmental time indicating that past events can be revisited and meanings reconstructed and revised as new skills with autobiographical reasoning emerge. These skills are developmentally critical for self because they likely support key functions such as building a retrospective self-continuity, the continuous sense of self that flows from higher level mental representations such as the life story (Bluck & Liao, 2013).

The related narrative mechanisms autobiographical reasoning and formation of self-event connections also matter for self-continuity. Autobiographical reasoning refers to “thinking or talking about the personal past that involves arguments that link distant elements from one’s life to each other and to the self in an attempt to relate present self to one’s personal past and future” (Habermas & Köber, 2015, p. 149). Such reasoning is often expressed in self-event connections when people interpret the relationship between an event and the sense of self (Pasupathi, Mansour, & Brubaker, 2007). Thus, self-event connections may help maintain existing self-concepts by describing how an event was associated with changes in the self, how it demonstrates stability, or by distancing an event from the self (e.g., “that was just not like me”). Hence, the types of self-event connections people tend to make matter. For example, in a narrative about a personal transgression, a past participant wrote (Mansfield, McLean, & Lilgendahl, 2010):

At that particular stage of my dysfunctional life I had no code of ethics or thought about morality in general until I met a woman of monumental character who, by example, pointed the way for me. I like to think I’ve since evolved because the meat of daily life for me is forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion, empathy, and kindness. I’m certainly not a paean to these virtues but they continue to progress with practice.

The narrator expresses knowledge about the self and simultaneously reasons about virtue as a current developmental project. In particular the narrator suggests that two elements of the past, his lack of ethics and meeting someone of high character, set the stage for virtue development. Current self-knowledge may be reinforced with the telling of this story, whereas views of the self as lacking ethics may be weakened with the telling of this story. Other work has found that stories of personal transgressions, which include growth-oriented self-event connections, are predictive of increased perceptions that one has self-compassion over a 1-month period (Mansfield, Pasupathi, & McLean, 2015). Expressing similar ideas about the self in repeated narratives may contribute to overall coherence in self-understanding by providing confirming evidence for what constitutes “me” today (Pasupathi et al., 2014) and as noted these interpretations about self are related to psychological functioning.

Liao, Bluck, and Westerhof (this issue) provide longitudinal evidence indicating that positive meaning-making about self-defining memories predicted increased self-esteem 1 year later even after controlling for event valence and frequency of using event memory for psychosocial functions. Holm and Thomsen (this issue) report findings that self-coherence is a key component for overall psychological health, and Banks and Salmon (this issue) find that making negative self-event connections in low-point, turning-point, and high-point narratives is associated with increased depression beyond other cognitive variables. In somewhat different ways, each of these works speak to the key notion that aspects of self, and adaptive and maladaptive psychological functioning, are tied to how people make sense of the self in the ongoing daily business of life.

Other research speaking to the relationship between narrative and self has focused more closely on how aspects of self impact how one narrates. For example, people who score high in neuroticism are more likely to narrate growth stories with a negative emotional tone, even when controlling for the valence of the events being narrated (Lilgendahl & McAdams, 2011) and overall their narratives have fewer themes of personal or relational growth than people scoring low in neuroticism (Bauer, McAdams, & Sakaeda, 2005). Although much of the research on narrative and self is correlational, the bulk of the findings suggests that neuroticism may exert important influences on how people construe events and those construals are represented in people’s narratives (see also Adler, Kissel, & McAdams, 2006; McAdams et al., 2004; Pennebaker & King, 1999). Similarly, people who score high on agreeableness are likely to include a high number of communion themes (a focus on relationships with others) in their narratives (McAdams et al., 2004). Beyond personality traits, experimental research supports the idea that self-concepts influence narrative construction. Pasupathi, Alderman, and Shaw (2007) showed that those who conceptualized themselves as having high expertise at a task generated more contributions in a conversation about that task than people whose self-concept of expertise is low. McAdams et al. (1997) found that highly generative adults, adults whose central aspects of identity include the desire to give back to future generations and make a positive difference in the lives of others, were more likely than less generative adults to tell a commitment story as their life narrative.

The view that narrative and self are reciprocally influential suggests that self is influenced by narration and narration is at least partially directed by self (even a self that is socially situated in a conversational setting). This approach presupposes a self that is relatively stable across situations. Next, we return to an alternative approach that was introduced earlier when we examined narrative and social interaction. However, earlier we focused on how we might understand memory processes in the context of this model, now we briefly emphasize research asking how we can understand the self if it is manifested by narrative actions.

Self as Enacted Through Narrative Participation

For some researchers, autobiographical narratives are considered no more “special” for the self (as knower or known) than other types of narratives (Bamberg & Demuth, 2016), such as telling a friend the story of a bad call in a baseball game. Instead, what is special about narrating is that when we tell the story of the bad call the self is enacted through participation in culturally derived ways of telling coherent stories (e.g., temporal ordering, character development, ascribing agency to characters). To push things a bit further, researchers who take this view may also question the extent to which the self, especially conceived of as identity, has interiority or some essence that could be “dug in to” on reflection (Bamberg & Demuth, 2016, p. 17). Instead, what is understood as “self” is something that is best thought of as enacted in discursive positioning (Korobov, 2015). From this approach, discursive actions, that is, how we say what we say in particular interactions with particular individuals are “at times ingredients in the constitution of identities as interactional (not mentalistic) phenomenon” (Korobov, 2015, p. 214). According to this approach, the conversational practices that we engage in as we narrate everyday experiences are important because sense of self is based on culturally embedded interactional processes. Hence, this view aligns more closely with the notion that narrative is a constitutive process for self (albeit a shifting self sans interiority) and a window on real cultural and social processes.

Concluding Thoughts: Narratives as Data

We conclude this paper by emphasizing that the theoretical orientations described thus far have implications for methodology when conducting studies with autobiographical narratives, returning us to the question: What do we have when we have a narrative? We believe that narratives provide a unique type of data about research participants and those data create unique opportunities to understand people and unique challenges for researchers. For example, two researchers may both elicit narratives of personal transgressions from participants. For one researcher, the key question may involve understanding the ratio of factual details to psychological interpretations, thus she codes for facts and interpretations (e.g., Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010; Grysman & Denney, 2017). Yet, another researcher is interested in understanding the extent to which interpreting the self as being positively changed by a personal transgression relates to well-being, thus he codes for interpretations of growth (Mansfield et al., 2015; McLean & Pratt, 2006; Pals, 2006). Moreover, in theory, the two researchers could do this with the same data set leading to different manuscripts with two entirely different sets of conclusions about the same participants. These different outcomes result from the richness of narrative data and they suggest that different researchers can assume that they have different types of information when they have narratives.

Consider a cooking metaphor. Just as narrating is one of the most ubiquitous behaviors that people engage in, rice is one of the most widely eaten foods on the planet. Although a common ingredient, the heterogeneity of dishes created with rice is astounding. When I (CM) see rice, I think of jambalaya, but sticky rice, rice pudding, and arroz con frijoles are the common go-to assumptions of my friends and colleagues. A friend, born and raised in India, forbade her American husband from preparing rice because at the minimum she assumed that “basic” rice had to be cooked with cardamom pods, cinnamon, and cumin. Although narrative data are becoming a more common ingredient in social science research, the way that rice is a common ingredient throughout the world, researchers use them to different ends (to create different dishes as it were) because we make different assumptions about what we have when we have narrative data. We believe that this is an excellent place for narrative research to be. Yet, we also believe that our assumptions and interpretations about our data should be clear.

Three papers in this issue highlight how interpreting narrative data can change with changing methodologies or assumptions. Alea (this issue) compares spontaneous to cued elicitation in narrative prompts. With a specific focus on the life story interview (McAdams, 1995), she finds that meaning-making often occurs spontaneously in some events, but that men and women respond differently when cued to elaborate about an event’s meaning. Such methodological work can clarify inconsistencies between studies as a larger corpus of data on narrative meaning-making builds, and emphasizes that the assumption of asking for a life story memory can be conceptualized as eliciting an existing internal representation or as a reflection of how participants respond differently to a cue elicitation. Similarly, Panattoni and McLean (this issue) examine inconsistencies between narrative and questionnaire data across two studies, deepening an understanding of how to conceptualize these variables. These inconsistencies mean very different things if we consider narratives and questionnaires as two means of accessing an internalized representation or if we consider them two substantively different processes. Holm and Thomsen (this issue) consider the way questionnaire data can be used to access narrative constructs and argue for their value in providing incremental validity without confounding method with theoretical construct. These three papers draw attention to a growing need for clarity in connecting methods to theory in autobiographical narrative research. In this final section, we briefly return to this special issue’s theme of narrative as a window onto cognition and personality or narrative as a developmental mechanism, considering how those perspectives will lead to different foci in study design and content coding of autobiographical narratives, and of different interpretations of results. Notably, “window” and “process” approaches are not mutually exclusive, and Pauspathi et al. (this issue) demonstrate how both approaches can be used simultaneously with the same coding methodology in one study.

Narrative as a Window

One common approach among personality researchers is to collect and analyze autobiographical narratives and to consider what variance in narrated content and structure can tell us about the narrator and selfhood. Coding narratives for meaning-making processes (e.g., McLean et al., 2007), redemptive sequencing (e.g., McAdams & Guo, 2015), emotional tone (e.g., McAdams et al., 2004), or themes of agency and communion (e.g., Woike & Polo, 2001), and then comparing these narrative codes to other measures (e.g., personality, Lilgendahl, McLean, & Mansfield, 2013; well-being, Adler, Lodi-Smith, Philippe, & Houle, 2016) demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between narrative identity (Singer, 2004) and other aspects of people’s lives.

A related approach among cognitive researchers emphasizes how narratives organize mental representation (Nelson, 1996), thus serving as an indicator of memory or cognitive capacity. High-point analysis (Labov & Waletsky, 1967; Peterson & McCabe, 1983) and story grammar approaches (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979) emphasized a central problem to be solved or a goal as a unifying element of a narrative; more recently, the NaCCS (Reese et al., 2011) outlines coding for coherence and includes context and chronology as building blocks of a coherent narrative. Numerous studies have used narrative coding to outline different narrative processing at different ages of childhood and adolescence (e.g., for coherence, Bohn & Berntsen, 2008; Grysman & Hudson, 2010; Habermas & de Silveira, 2008) and later adulthood (e.g., for semantic and episodic memory, Madore, Gaesser, & Schacter, 2014), emphasizing coded narratives as reflecting cognitive skills that improve or decline with age.

Narrative as a Process

Narrative work with a sociocultural focus emphasizes a unit of analysis in which some truth is discovered not about self or memory, but about the dynamic, interpersonal process that influences both. The rich literature on mother–child conversations has emphasized the role of maternal scaffolding of memory processes, with dozens of studies indicating ways in which the content of mothers’ talk about these events is linked to children’s greater recall at the ages of 2 to 8 (for reviews, see Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Reese, 2009). A broader application of this interpersonal process can be found in extensive cross-cultural analyses (for more on cross-cultural applications of narrative methods, see Kulkofsky, Wang, & Koh, 2009; Mullen & Yi, 1995; see Köber et al.; Pasupathi et al.; and Wang et al., this issue).

Another approach in the “narrative-as-process” model considers how the process of narration shifts individuals’ development. For example, Banks and Salmon (this issue) show how negative self-event connections in narrative predict depression over and above other cognitive predictors, suggesting that the process of narrating negative connections reinforces depression. Contrastingly, Liao et al. (this issue) suggest that positive meaning-making in narrative serves as a pathway to generating self-esteem. These papers build on Adler et al.’s (2016) review of studies showing how narrative data provide incremental validity when predicting well-being, suggesting that narrative data capture more than a simple assessment of one’s current state of mind.

Conclusion

Our primary hope for this special issue is to bring together a diverse set of voices to better understand how narrative is conceptualized and employed by psychology researchers. Having laid out some of the primary ways of understanding narrative, we welcome readers to our special issue. Its various contributors consider narrative as a window on cognitive and personality processes or as a driver of those processes. Many resulting definitions of narrative abound. Does narrative build personality, organize memory, or simply reflect these independent processes? McAdams (1996) has suggested that identity is the story we tell about ourselves, suggesting a central role of narrative in personality processes. Considering these approaches leads to an understanding of narrative as simultaneously external (i.e., social) and internal (i.e., self-defining), essential to the nexus of self and memory. The authors, in the papers that follow, carefully expand on these and other issues central to narrative methods in cognitive and personality research and help us understand what we have when we have an autobiographical narrative.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Azriel Grysman holds a PhD in cognitive psychology from the Rutgers University. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Hamilton College.

Cade D. Mansfield earned his PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Utah. He is an assistant professor at Weber State University.

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