Science of Stories: An Introduction to Narrative Psychology »

János Lászó is professor of social psychology at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest and the University of Pécs, where he is currently head of the Institute of Psychology and of the Doctoral School in Psychology.

The Science of Stories explores the role narrative plays in human life. Supported by in-depth research, the book demonstrates how the ways in which people tell their stories can be indicative of how they construct their worlds and their own identities.

Based on linguistic analysis and computer technology, Laszlo offers an innovative methodology which aims to uncover underlying psychological processes in narrative texts. The reader is presented with a theoretical framework along with a series of studies which explore the way a systematic linguistic analysis of narrative discourse can lead to a scientific study of identity construction, both individual and group.

The book gives a critical overview of earlier narrative theories and summarizes previous scientific attempts to uncover relationships between language and personality. It also deals with social memory and group identity: various narrative forms of historical representations (history books, folk narratives, historical novels) are analyzed as to how they construct the past of a nation.

The Science of Stories is the first book to build a bridge between scientific and hermeneutic studies of narratives. As such, it will be of great interest to a diverse spectrum of readers in social science and the liberal arts, including those in the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies and history.

Illustrations x

Introduction 1

The nature of narratives 1

Narrative analysis 3

Preliminary on scientific narrative psychology 4

1 Foundations of narrative psychology 7

The narrative nature of human knowledge 7

Narratology 10

The referentiality of narrative 11

The reference of therapeutic narratives 13

History as narrative 13

Science as narrative 14

Narrative causality 15

Hermeneutic composition 16

The role of time in narrative 16

Genre-specific particularity 18

Genre archetypes 18

Narrative canons 19

Narrative comprehension 22

Narrative speech acts 24

Narrative perspective 24

Psycho-narratology 26

Summary 27

2 The place of narrative in psychology 29

Psychology: natural and/or social science 29

Knowing reality and/or understanding narrative 30

The problem of complexity of phenomena: narrative as complex pattern 32

The issue of complexity in the theory of evolution 34

Evolution and cultural evolution 35

Space and narrative 35

Time and narrative 36

Intention and action in narrative 36

The archaeological paradigm in psychology 39

Narrative as medium of historical-cultural psychology 40

Narrative psychology as cultural and evolutionary psychology 41

Summary 42

3 Narrative psychology and postmodernism 43

Modernity and postmodernity 45

Postmodernism and psychoanalysis 46

Narrativity as constraint on meaning construction 48

Narrative literature and narrative psychology 49

Narrative psychology as psychology of meaning 51

Summary 52

4 Narrative psychology's contribution to the second cognitive revolution 54

Forerunners of narrative psychology in experimental and social psychology 55

Bartlett and thepsychology of meaning 56

The problem of meaning in experimental social psychology 58

Socio-cultural aspects of psychological meaning 60

Communication and cognition 61

Narrative psychological approach 63

Social cognition and narrative psychology 66

Summary 68

5 On representation 69

Experience as a representational form 72

An interlude: one more time on literature 74

Returning to the forms of representing experience 75

Allusion 76

The formulation and return of experience in narratives 78

Dissemination of representations 79

Narrative spreading 82

Summary 84

6 Theory of social representations 86

The functions of social representations 89

The processes of social representations 1: anchoring 90

The processes of social representations 2: objectification 91

The relationship of social representations theory with traditional theories of social psychology 92

The empirical study of social representations 97

The use of the narrative train of ideas in social representations research 99

How narrative approach contributes to the explanatory potential of social representations 104

Identity and social representation 106

Personal identity 107

Social identity 108

Group identity and the representation of the social world 108

Group identity as the demarcation of group boundaries 110

Summary 115

7 Identity and narrative 116

McAdams' model for analysing autobiographies 117

Barclay's model for analysing the coherence of autobiographical narrative 118

High ego: Complex ideology, more questioning 119

High ego: Integrated imagos 119

The roots of knowledge about the self 121

Narrative ideas in the research on self-development 122

Trauma and narrative 124

Therapeutic narratives 125

Life story as a social construct 126

Life stories or stories from life: significant life events 126

Summary 128

8 Language and soul 129

Language and world view 129

Linguistic forms and forms of thinking 130

Content analysis 131

Language and personality 131

Language and situation 132

The automation of content analysis 133

Targeted interviews 134

Narrative interview 135

Summary 137

9 Narrative psychological content analysis 138

Characters and their functions 138

Control of spatial-emotional distance 141

Narrative perspective 142

The role of time in the narrative 145

Narrative evaluation 148

Narrative coherence 150

Psychological interpretations of self-reference 151

Negation 152

The computerization of content analysis in narrative psychology 153

Reliability and validity studies of the narrative content-analytic programs 154

What do we measure when testing validity? 154

Summary 154

10 Social memory and social identity 156

Types of explanation 156

History, narrative, identity: construction and reality 158

Social, collective and cultural representation 159

Collective memory and social representations 159

Group narrative and identity 161

National identity in the mirror of history 163

National identity and historical narrative 163

Two examples: study of Hungarian national identity in the light of folk-historical narratives and of history books 168

Methods of analysis 169

Life trajectory of a nation 170

Folk-historical schemes 172

What was missing from the stories 174

Group agency and responsibility 174

Further steps towards the automated narrative psychological content analysis 175

The representation of common history 176

Summary 177

11 Roots and perspectives of scientific narrative psychology 179

Appendix 184

On Lin-Tag (mtapi.hu/Lin-Tag) 184

Linguistic operationalization of the programs 186

Linguistic operationalization of the perspective forms 188

Linguistic operationalization of the approach-avoidance dimension 190

Validity and reliability studies with the programs 191

Reliability studies of the program modules 193

Validity studies of the program modules 193

Studies with the narrative perspective module 193

Validity study of the emotion regulating function of the narrative perspective module 194

Studies with the Approx-Change program 197

Validity tests of Approx-Change program in clinical and normal samples 197

Validity tests of the Approx-Change module in the stratified normal sample 198

References 207

Index 225