This article describes a Narrative Engagement Framework (NEF) for guiding communication-based prevention efforts. This framework suggests that personal narratives have distinctive capabilities in prevention. The article discusses the concept of narrative, links narrative to prevention, and discusses the central role of youth in developing narrative interventions. As illustration, the authors de...

We suggest that the hierarchical predictive processing account detailed by Clark can be usefully integrated with narrative psychology by situating personal narratives at the top of an individual's knowledge hierarchy. Narrative representations function as high-level generative models that direct our attention and structure our expectations about unfolding events. Implications for integrating sc...

This study investigated the possible pragmatic change concerning the narrative production of older adults. Brazilian young and older adults residing in Porto Alegre/BR were instructed to tell personal and fictitious stories. Propositions of their discourse were analyzed in terms of relevance, subjectivity and repetition. Older adults presented a greater proportion of indirectly relevant proposi...

Several scholarly trends, such as narrative medicine, patient-centered and relationship-centered care, have long advocated for the value of the patient's voice in the practice of medicine. As theories of textual analysis are applied to the understanding of stories of illness, doctors and scholars have the opportunity to develop more nuanced and multifaceted appreciation for these accounts. We r...

Institutional change has a human face. This paper explores how a select group of women in China and India experienced economic and political turmoil and why they chose to become change agents. Through in-depth interviews with 40 women from NGOs, government agencies and private business, four broad moments in the evolution of a change agent are identified and discussed: (1) awareness of a double...

After an introductory course in experiential-integrative psychotherapy, 21 graduate students provided personal narratives of their experiences, which were analyzed using the grounded theory method. Results produced 37 hierarchically organized experiences, revealing that students perceived multiple changes in both professional (i.e., skill acquisition and learning related to the therapeutic proc...

Emotion classification within text has been attempted many times through lexical and implicit features. It remains to be seen if the extracted features from personal narratives can provide a base model for emotion classification. This paper explores the ability of traditional lexical and syntactic features used in previous emotion classification work toward personal narratives. The results are ...

This chapter develops three points of elaboration and theoretical expansion upon Cohler's (1982) treatise on personal narrative and life course. First, we highlight Cohler's emphasis on an interpretive, idiographic approach to the study of lives and reveal the radicalism of this approach, particularly in its ability to interrogate the lived experience of social categorization. Second, we link C...