Why, How, and When to Integrate Narrative Identity Within Dimensional Approaches to Personality Disorders

Researchers and clinicians are beginning to adopt dimensional approaches in the study and treatment of personality disorders (PD). Although dimensional approaches in the DSM-5 and ICD-11 hold considerable benefit, they need to better incorporate an appreciation of individuals’ life stories, or narrative identities. Doing so will be necessary to flesh out the emphasis that both frameworks place on the role of identity in personality pathology. In this article, the authors review why, how, and when narrative identity theory and research can be integrated within dimensional approaches to PD. The authors describe established ways to assess narrative identity, review extant research on this construct in relation to PD, and signal areas crucial for future research. Stories lie at the heart of what it means to be human. The authors conclude that a greater consideration of the ways in which the self is storied can help further understanding and treatment of PD.

Reimagining Higher Education as Response to Ongoing Crises

College students and professors have experienced dramatic change in how they are able to attend and participate in classes, convey information, interact with one another, and teach in a meaningful, dynamic way. This chapter explores what worked and what did not work during this shift to online teaching as universities in the United States closed down for almost all in-person classes. Research includes narrative identity, with data derived from collecting stories of the lived experience during COVID-19. Topics explored are issues of how higher education relates to the traditional U.S. college experience, ethics, leadership, money, equitable technology, and mental health. Suggestions will be presented in terms of what can be learned from this particular crisis that can be enacted in framing better practices in higher education as future domestic and global crises emerge.

Advancing a Three-Tier Personality Framework for Posttraumatic Growth

Adversity has been assumed to foster positive personality change under certain conditions. In this article, we examine this assumption within the context of the three-tier personality framework integrating traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity to provide a comprehensive understanding of personality growth. We first review findings on how adverse events affect personality on each of these three levels. Second, we summarize knowledge on event-based and person-based predictors of personality change in the face of adversity. Third, we specify affective, behavioral, and cognitive processes that explain personality change across levels of personality. Innovatively, our proposed process model addresses change at all three levels of personality, as well as similarities and differences in processes across the levels. We conclude by discussing unresolved issues, asking critical questions, and posing challenging hypotheses for testing this framework.

Incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting psychological well-being

The goal of the present study was to replicate and extend previous research that demonstrated the incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting psychological well-being among Korean adults. We recruited 147 Korean adults living in South Korea who completed a battery of questionnaires that assessed the Big Five traits, extrinsic value orientation, self-concept clarity, and psychological well-being. Participants then wrote a story about how they had become the persons they were, which was subsequently coded in terms of agency. We found that psychological well-being was positively related to extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and self-concept clarity, but negatively to neuroticism and extrinsic value orientation. The positive relation between agency, coded from narratives, and psychological well-being was significant both with and without controlling for the other variables. These results showed that narrative identity has incremental validity in predicting well-being among individuals who live in a culture where collectivism and individualism coexist.

Opening Possibilities for a Meaningful Life Narrative Identity in Service of Existential Health and Spiritual Care

Paul Ricoeur's understanding of philosophical hermeneutics offers a valuable tool to think about the meaning of life. By approaching philosophy as a way of living through the need for meaning, Ricoeur places his hermeneutics between two common directions in twentieth-century philosophy as a way of living, Sartrean humanism and Foucauldian antihumanism. As such, Ricoeur's narrative conception of the self can contribute to rethinking a conception of existential health and spiritual care.

Narrative identity among people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic: The interdependent self

This study examines narrative identity among a large, diverse (American) sample of people with disabilities (PWDs) during the “second wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic (October-December, 2020). The study relied on abductive analyses, combining a purely inductive phase of inquiry followed by two rounds of investigation that filtered inductive insights through three theoretical lenses: social-ecological theory, the theory of narrative identity, and perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. The central result was the identification of a particular configuration of self, one that was demonstrably interdependent with both immediate interpersonal contexts and with broader cultural contexts. This interdependent self was interpreted in both positive and negative ways by PWDs. These findings invite future inquiry into commonplace conceptualizations of an independent self at the center of personality research.