Narrative identity is a person’s internalised and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose
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How do you understand personality?
need to understand how a person crafts narratives from experiences, tells the stories internally/to others and apply them to knowledge of themselves, other and the world generally (Singer, 2004)
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What is McAdam's claim on trait approaches?
o that the Big 5 makes the whole of personality to be closely associated with traits, Traits are not how adults explain their individuality, Traits are not grounded in a cultural or sociohistorical context
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What is the overview of model/
The theory is based on: the self is made, it develops over time and that people seek temporal coherence in their self
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What is a personality trait?
Broad descriptions of someone to understand who they could be as a person
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What is a personal concern?
What they care about, their skills, roles, values and goals
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identity/life history
this is the inner story of that person that integrates the past, perceived present and anticipated future. Finding out what they have done, is doing and what they want to achieve.
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What two types of ways to tell a story are there?
Redemptive: stories that transition from bad to good, contaminative stories: Transitions that go from good to bad,
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What is second paragraph?
Advantages
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McAdams (2013)
When a person describes how a negative event led to a positive outcome and how it builds on the person and on their personality as a result
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Alder et al (2015)
89 late mid life participants recruited to do Life Story Interviews. Their mental and physical health was assessed 5 times over 4 years.
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What did results show?
individual differences in narrative identity can predict change in mental health for agency, redemption and contamination. However, it could not give a prediction for communion.
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Giddens (1991)
Argued that under the complex social and psychological conditions of cultural modernity ‘a person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important as it is- in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative goi
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St Aubin (1996)
Found that different emotional tones in life-narrative accounts mapped onto particular political and religious belief system
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Dunlop and Tracy (2013)
They used recovering alcoholics to see if redemptive narrative can predict behavioural change
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What did they do?
A questionnaire on health, personality and months of sobriety.
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What did they find?
They found that in 83%, redemption significantly predicted sobriety. There was the same findings when controlling other aspects (AA involvement, optimism to get better, mental health etc)
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Alder et al (2012)
Performed extensive life story interviews which were then analysed.
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What did they look for?
themes of agency, communion fulfilment and narrative coherence significantly distinguished the stories of those with Borderline Personality Disorder, and those without BPD
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What were the associations between the theme of agency and psychopathology?
were evident 6-12 months following the life story interview. This bridges together personality disorders/a persons personality and narrative identity
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What is the 3rd paragraph?
Against
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Buss and Cantor (1989)
Stated that you cannot pick up on people’s personality traits from a narrative story as instead there are middle-level units in personality
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Where are these situated?
between general traits and specific behaviour. These cannot be found through life stories
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Bouchard et al (1990)
A more accurate way of understanding a person’s personality is through genetics.
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What was found?
This study found twins have consistently produced heritability quotients of around 50% for most personality traits. This is more reliable than hearing people’s accounts of their lives
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What did Gray suggest (1987)
Suggests that individual differences such as Extraversion is more accurate when linked up with a behavioural approach system in the brain (BAS from RST theory).
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This is a system that is what?
conceptualised as regulating positive approach behaviour instead of hearing how a person tells a story about them
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Other cards in this set
Card 2
Front
How do you understand personality?
Back
need to understand how a person crafts narratives from experiences, tells the stories internally/to others and apply them to knowledge of themselves, other and the world generally (Singer, 2004)
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