People use metaphors to cognitively frame their experiences as well as to explain those experiences to others, especially in complex medical situations. However, previous research has not fully explored the extent to which metaphors may be helpful or harmful to achieving well-being. This investigation fills this gap by identifying and explaining metaphor use in the context of infertility. Guide...

Self-narratives of patients have received increasing interest in schizophrenia since they offer unique material to study patients' subjective experience related to their illness, in particular the alteration of self that accompanies schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated the life narratives and the ability to integrate and bind memories of personal events into a coherent narrative in 27 ...

Research has indicated that schizophrenia patients report similar amounts of experienced emotion in response to emotional material compared with nonpatients. However, less is known about how schizophrenia patients describe and make sense of their emotional life events. We adopted a narrative approach to investigate schizophrenia patients' renderings of their emotional life experiences. In Study...

As information technology innovation becomes increasingly complex and as information technologies diffuse into new professions and institutional contexts, researchers are looking to project participants and organizational members to understand how their interpretations of technology influence change processes and outcomes. Technology frames of reference (TFR) is a well-established theoretic fra...

BACKGROUND Informed consent is a mainstay of clinical practice, with both moral and legal forces. Material disclosure about extreme treatments, however, is unlikely to convey the full impact of the experience of treatment. Informed consent may be flawed under such circumstances. The aims of this study were to compare expressed satisfaction with pretreatment information to satisfaction after exp...

OBJECTIVE This was a study of positive psychological traits in a group of rural Italians aged 90 to 101 years, and their children or other family members. DESIGN Mixed-methods quantitative (standardized rating scales) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews) study. SETTING Study participants' homes in nine villages in the Cilento region of southern Italy. PARTICIPANTS Twenty-nine nona...

International Coaching Psychology Review ● Vol. 7 No. 2 September 2012 © The British Psychological Society – ISSN: 1750-2764 LTHOUGH COACHING is typically thought of as being a goal-focused activity, the use of goals in coaching is somewhat controversial. Common arguments against the use of goal setting in coaching include the propositions that goal setting is an overly-linear process that cons...

This article reviews research in the fields of psychology, literature, communication, human-computer interaction, public health, and consumer behavior on narrative and its potential relationships with videogames and story immersion. It also reviews a narrative's role in complementing behavioral change theories and the potential of story immersion for health promotion through videogames. Videoga...

We introduce a class of systems that motivate and aid users to think and write about their personal experiences by presenting them with similar first-person narratives, which allows them to reflect on the connection between their experience and the story presented. These systems rely upon the narrative intelligence of humans to establish the relevance connections, and so can make use of story i...