Posttraumatic Growth at Work

The phenomenon of posttraumatic growth—the transformative positive change that can occur as a result of a struggle with great adversity—has been a focus of interest for psychologists for more than two decades. Research on work-related posttraumatic growth has concentrated primarily on contexts that are inherently traumatic, either through direct exposure to trauma, such as in the military, or through secondary trauma, such as in professions that provide care for traumatized others. There is also an emerging literature on posttraumatic growth in “ordinary” work. Organized into seven sections, this review draws on the research on posttraumatic growth in response to both personal and work-based adversity to build a model of work-related posttraumatic growth. Later sections raise challenges in the study of posttraumatic growth at work and identify critical future research directions. Practical implications for organizations and their members are considered throughout the review and are summarized at the end.

Life Narratives Are More Other-Centered, More Negative, and Less Coherent in Turkey Than in Germany: Comparing Provincial-Turkish, Metropolitan-Turkish, Turkish-German, and Native German Educated Young Adults

An individualized and coherent life story has been described as the form of identity that is required by highly mobile individualistic Western societies, whereas more family-oriented, traditional societies require more role-based, synchronic identities. Therefore in individualistic cultures entire life narratives can be expected to be more coherent and to contain more autobiographical arguments that contribute to life narrative coherence. This cultural group difference is expected to be mediated by individuals’ conformity to their respective cultural normative concept of biography, such that more conformity leads to less life narrative coherence and fewer autobiographical arguments. We tested these expectations by eliciting entire life narratives and cultural life scripts from four different cultural groups of students of technical universities: from provincial Karabük and from metropolitan Istanbul in Turkey, as well as from students with a Turkish migrant and with a native German background from urban Frankfurt am Main, Germany (N = 96). Expectations were confirmed for global life narrative coherence and autobiographical arguments with self-event connections. Conformity with a normative concept of biography indeed partially mediated cultural influences on life narrative coherence. Life narratives from Turkey also contained more family-related events and, unexpectedly, were more negative. Thus creating a coherent life narrative is more typical for cultures that require autonomous, individualized selves rather than for cultures requiring more related selves, reflecting the life story’s suitability for expressing individualized identities and its lesser suitability for expressing interdependent identities.

“So Now, I Wonder, What Am I?”: A Narrative Approach to Bicultural Identity Integration

Individuals socialized in multiple cultures actively construct their bicultural identity in the context of relevant life events. However, the content and meaning of these experiences, as subjectively constructed and understood by the individual, remain largely unexplored in relation to biculturalism outcomes. Using a narrative approach, two studies of U.S. biculturals examined how memories about the experience of being bicultural (“bicultural memory narratives”) related to bicultural identity integration (BII). BII describes having cultural identities that are blended and exist harmoniously within the self (vs. having dissociated and conflicting identities). In Study 1, bicultural college students shared two bicultural memory narratives, which were coded for the past event valence, exploratory processing, and ending valence (positive vs. negative ending). Most reported memories about at least somewhat negative experiences, and yet narrating those events with positive endings was predictive of higher BII, even after controlling for other factors, such as trait affect. In Study 2, second-generation bicultural adults ranging in age from 18 to 62 shared narratives about memories of bicultural conflict, which were also coded for exploratory processing and positive resolution. Similar to Study 1, positive resolution predicted higher levels of BII, independent of other factors. Bicultural identity conflict was found to decrease with age across adulthood. Findings for exploratory processing were inconclusive and suggest that its role in BII may fluctuate over time and be dependent on several factors, including age, type of memory, and time spent exploring bicultural identity.

The narrative self in rural dementia: a case study from eastern Nova Scotia

This analysis examines how the narrative self of a person with dementia is maintained by family members in a small rural Nova Scotian community. In the literature, the expectation is often that rurality is a condition of isolation, distance from family and limited health resources. However, drawing on three years of ethnographic and interviewing research with a large extended family whose patriarch, Alexander, is a person with dementia, we demonstrate how a community's rurality influences interpretations of dementia. In Alexander's rurality, of particular import are local definitions of belonging, which privilege intimate knowledge of local history, working as a farmer to shape the land, and being of Scottish descent and male. As family members find Alexander's belonging to come into question in their community, we show them to employ narratives in which he is valorised for continuing to uphold local values – of ‘usefulness’ and of ‘being the land’. We show how the family members must also revisit and revise these narratives when Alexander's belonging is further called into question outside the family setting and, specifically, at the local farmer's market, where Alexander is often no longer greeted by other marketgoers. The men and women of the family arrive at different interpretations of this development, with the women considering marketgoers to demean and dehumanise Alexander, while the men feel that the marketgoers are avoiding interactions that would embarrass him. Such disagreements reveal the ongoing emotional labour of creating narratives that lack closure, certainty and consensus, as well as ways in which gender and rurality operate intersectionally in the process of meaning-making.

The life story from age 26 to 32: Rank-order stability and mean-level change

OBJECTIVE

In this longitudinal, mixed-methods project, the primary focus was to examine the rank-order stability and mean-level change in the life story during the period of emerging adulthood to young adulthood, while also investigating how the transition to parenthood may impact the life story.

METHOD

Seventy-two participants described three key life story scenes at age 26 and again at 32 (28% attrition from age 26 to 32). The narratives were coded for a range of features, including motivational themes (agency, communion), affective themes (emotional tone), an integrative meaning theme (coherent positive resolution), and a structural property (narrative complexity).

RESULTS

Overall, there was moderate temporal stability and mean-level increase in several features of narrative identity over this key period. Positive changes in communion levels and overall emotional tone of life story scenes were especially evident for new parents at age 32.

CONCLUSIONS

These longitudinal results suggested that adopting new social roles, in this case becoming a parent, predicted how the life story was expressed, just as they seemed to influence other levels of personality, such as traits, following the social investment principle.

The Psychological Self as Actor, Agent, and Author

The psychological self may be construed as a reflexive arrangement of the subjective “I” and the constructed “Me,” evolving and expanding over the human life course. The psychological self begins life as a social actor, construed in terms of performance traits and social roles. By the end of childhood, the self has become a motivated agent, too, as personal goals, motives, values, and envisioned projects for the future become central features of how the I conceives of the Me. A third layer of selfhood begins to form in the adolescent and emerging adulthood years, when the self as autobiographical author aims to construct a story of the Me, to provide adult life with broad purpose and a dynamic sense of temporal continuity. An integrative theory that envisions the psychological self as a developing I–Me configuration of actor, agent, and author helps to synthesize a wide range of conceptions and findings on the self from social, personality, cognitive, cultural, and developmental psychology and from sociology and other social sciences. The actor–agent–author framework also sheds new light on studies of self-regulation, self-esteem, self-continuity, and the relationship between self and culture.

Constructing stories of self-growth: how individual differences in patterns of autobiographical reasoning relate to well-being in midlife

Although growth has been a central focus in narrative research, few studies have examined growth comprehensively, as a story that emerges across the interpretation of many events. In this study, we examined how individual differences in autobiographical reasoning (AR) about self-growth relate to traits and well-being in a national sample of midlife adults (N= 88) who ranged in age from 34 to 68. Two patterns of growth-related AR were identified: (1) positive processing, defined as the average tendency to interpret events positively (vs. negatively), and (2) differentiated processing, defined as the extent to which past events are interpreted as causing a variety of forms of self-growth. Results showed that positive processing was negatively related to neuroticism and predicted well-being even after controlling for the average valence of past events. Additionally, differentiated processing of negative events but not positive events was positively related to openness and predictive of well-being. Finally, growth-related AR patterns independently predicted well-being beyond the effects of traits and demographic factors.

The Transforming Self

The study examined the extent to which a service trip to Nicaragua affected college students’ narrative understanding of themselves and their commitment to volunteer service. College students who went on a spring break service trip to work with poor citizens of Nicaragua wrote narrative accounts of three important experiences on the trip shortly after they returned. Measures of volunteerism were collected before the trip and at two points afterward: 1 week and 3 months later. Themes of self-transformation in service trip narratives predicted trip-related volunteerism one week and 3 months later, even after controlling for prior volunteerism. Themes of sympathy in the narratives predicted trip-related volunteerism one week but not 3 months, and themes of helplessness negatively related to prior volunteerism. The results underscore the importance of examining the role of life narratives in the development of volunteer behavior and service mindedness among emerging adults.

The development of personality disorders: perspectives from normal personality development in childhood and adolescence

The developmental pathways leading to personality disorders are poorly understood, but clues to these pathways come from recent research on personality disorders and normal personality development in childhood and adolescence. The first section of this paper reviews recent work on personality disorders in childhood and adolescence, and concludes that personality disorders in adolescence are already prevalent, moderately stable, and impairing. The second section draws on McAdams and Pals' personality model to offer a taxonomy of personality differences that can account for the known patterns of emerging personality pathology. This taxonomy includes youths' temperament and personality traits, mental representations (including attachment), coping strategies, and narrative identities. Individual differences in all of these domains may play critical roles in the development, manifestation, and course of personality disorders. Existing knowledge of normal and abnormal personality development can inform future research on the developmental pathways leading to personality pathology, the diagnostic criteria for personality disorders, and the development of validated treatments for personality disorders in the first two decades of life.