Stories for all ages: Narrating anger reduces distress across childhood and adolescence

Links Between Adolescents' Moral Mindsets and Narratives of their Inconsistent and Consistent Moral Value Experiences

Past work on moral mindsets has largely overlooked the adolescent developmental period, a time when adolescents are navigating the complexities of moral life and experiencing tensions between important moral principles and their own actions. This study investigated how moral incrementalism and essentialism are linked to how adolescents construct meanings about their moral experiences. The sample included 96 Canadian adolescents (12-15-years of age; M = 13.5 years). Adolescents generated written narratives of times when they acted inconsistently and consistently with a moral value, and completed a vignette-based measure of moral mindsets. Moral incrementalism was associated with references to the psychological and emotional facets of experiences and engaging in meaning-making processes in narratives. Adolescents who endorsed incrementalism disengaged less only when narrating a self-discrepant experience, indicating some context-specificity across moral event types. Overall, results contribute to scholarship on moral mindset and narrative identity construction. Findings illuminate how individual differences in youth's views of moral traits and behavior may be associated with important aspects of moral identity development such as delving into the psychological and emotional aspects of their experiences and engaging in meaning-making processes.

In their own words: Finding meaning in girls' experiences of puberty

The present study pairs narrative meaning-making with topic modeling to richly capture how girls choose to describe their experiences of change during puberty and to establish how these narratives map onto depressive symptoms. Participants (N = 125 girls; M_age  = 11.61 years; 90.40% White) wrote about changes during puberty and reported their level of pubertal development, relationships, and mood. The relationship between meaning-making and depressive symptoms was negatively moderated by early pubertal timing (d = .31) and positively moderated by more advanced pubertal status (d = .36). Exploratory analyses indicated that writing proportionally more about menstruation-related changes had a small effect on subsequent depressive symptoms (f²  = .12). Results provide a conceptual and methodological update to decades-old, landmark qualitative findings on girls' perceptions and assessments of experiences at puberty.

Differences Between Subclinical Ruminators and Reflectors in Narrating Autobiographical Memories: Innovative Moments and Autobiographical Reasoning

Reasoning may help solving problems and understanding personal experiences. Ruminative reasoning, however, is inconclusive, repetitive, and usually regards negative thoughts. We asked how reasoning as manifested in oral autobiographical narratives might differ when it is ruminative versus when it is adaptive by comparing two constructs from the fields of psychotherapy research and narrative research that are potentially beneficial: innovative moments (IMs) and autobiographical reasoning (AR). IMs captures statements in that elaborate on changes regarding an earlier personal previous problem of the narrator, and AR capture the connecting of past events with other parts of the narrator’s life or enduring aspects of the narrator. A total of N = 94 university students had been selected from 492 students to differ maximally on trait rumination and trait adaptive reflection, and were grouped as ruminators (N = 38), reflectors (N = 37), and a group with little ruminative and reflective tendencies (“unconcerned,” N = 19). Participants narrated three negative personal experiences (disappointing oneself, harming someone, and being rejected) and two self-related experiences of more mixed valence (turning point and lesson learnt). Reflectors used more IMs and more negative than positive autobiographical arguments (AAs), but not more overall AAs than ruminators. Group differences were not moderated by the valence of memories, and groups did not differ in the positive effect of narrating on mood. Trait depression/anxiety was predicted negatively by IMs and positively by AAs. Thus, IMs are typical for reflectors but not ruminators, whereas the construct of AR appears to capture reasoning processes irrespective of their ruminative versus adaptive uses.

Beyond the Text Given: Studying the Scaffolding of Narrative Emotion Regulation as a Contribution to Bruner and Feldman's Cultural Cognitive Developmental Psychology

Feldman et al. (Human Development, 36, 327-342, 1993) called for a new kind of psychology, a cultural cognitive developmental psychology. We critically consider their initial studies to discuss the scope of their program. In the spirit of this program we explore the development of scaffolding of narrative emotion regulation in adolescence. We present two co-narrations of sad events between mothers and their 12- and 18-year-old offspring to exemplify these mothers' age-sensitive strategies to scaffold adolescents' narrative emotion regulation. We identified three kinds of narrative arguments which mothers used for scaffolding and which are apparently acquired only in the course of adolescence: Embedding events in extended temporal, biographical contexts, relating events and reactions to individuals' enduring personalities, and re-appraising events by including more others', external, and hypothetical perspectives. They confirm developmental observations made by Feldman et al. (Human Development, 36, 327-342, 1993) and demonstrate their utility in the context of the development of emotion regulation.

Social Antecedents to the Development of Interoception: Attachment Related Processes Are Associated With Interoception

Current empirical work suggests that early social experiences could have a substantial impact on the areas of the brain responsible for representation of the body. In this context, one aspect of functioning that may be particularly susceptible to social experiences is interoception. Interoceptive functioning has been linked to several areas of the brain which show protracted post-natal development, thus leaving a substantial window of opportunity for environmental input to impact the development of the interoceptive network. In this paper we report findings from two existing datasets showing significant relationships between attachment related processes and interoception. In the first study, looking at a sample of healthy young adults (n = 132, 66 males), we assessed self-reported interoceptive awareness as assessed with the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (Mehling et al., 2012) and attachment style as assessed with the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale-Short (Wei et al., 2007). We found relationships between aspects of interoception and attachment style such that avoidant individuals reported lower interoceptive functioning across several dimensions [r's(130) = -0.20 to -0.26, p's < 0.05]. More anxious individuals, on the other hand, reported heightened interoceptive across several dimensions [r's(130) = 0.18 to 0.43, p's < 0.05]. In the second study, we examined the congruence between a youth's self-reported negative emotion and a measure of sympathetic nervous system arousal (SCL). The congruence score was positively associated with parental rejection of negative emotion. These results suggest that parenting style, as reported by the mother, are associated with a youth's ability to coordinate their self-reported emotional and physiological responding across a series of independent assessments, r(108) = -0.24, p < 0.05. In other words, the more maternal reported parental rejection of youth negative emotions, the less congruent a youth's self and physiological reports of distress.

Storied Lessons: Learning from Anger in Childhood by Narrating

We evaluated whether narrating anger-provoking events promoted learning from those events, as compared with other responses to anger, and whether the effectiveness of narrative depended on age. In addition, we tested relations between anger-reduction and learning and in a subset of participants, between narrative quality and learning. 248 youth (8 to 17 years old) recalled an anger-provoking experience, and were randomly assigned to one of four activities: recalling the event a second time, narrating the event, and distraction (via video game play or conversation). Youth then recalled the event one last time, and rated the extent to which they had learned from that event. Younger children reported more learning when they had narrated their experience. Older youth reported more learning when they had narrated the event more frequently prior to participation. Stronger reductions in anger following regulation were associated with greater self-reported learning. Finally, more elaborative and less resolved narratives were associated with greater self-reported learning.