Female Roles in La Cinta Dorada by María Manuela Reina and Models of the World

Our model of the world that we perceive within ourselves, our conscience, in short, our psychological balance is influenced by our surroundings. Part of the input to which we are exposed in this immediate environment is related to texts, self-managed discourse, which can also influence our internal model of the world; hence they are deserving of our attention. In the same way as the models of the world that we construct throughout our lives, reality is not static and also changes as time goes by. From a social point of view, we can see that the roles of women in modern-day society and the ways that those roles can be perceived today are a consequence of changes initiated in the past within different areas and in a prolonged process over time up until our day. With the aim of evaluating whether female drama has contributed to that change, we present an analysis in this paper of the play La Cinta Dorada [The Golden Ribbon] by María Manuela Reina, written and set in the 1980s, a decade that for Spain implied a more obvious abandonment of the most traditional conceptions of the role of women. In the analysis of the play, we see how the models of the world of the older people are counterposed with those of the younger people, a generational divide that is enriched with the gender difference, as we also analyze how the psychological structures of the female and male characters confront the clichés pertaining to another era in reference to such topics as success, infidelity, matrimony, and gender. The results of our analysis demonstrate how Reina responds to archaic conceptions, thereby inciting the audiences of the day to question their respective models of the world, especially, with regard to the role of the woman in society.

Childhood Trauma in Women and Fragmented Interview Narratives – Some Interdisciplinary Methodological and Clinical Implications

Trauma experience is understood through its expression in language, with implications for psycholinguistic and clinical research and analysis. Clinical research approaches often approach childhood trauma through investigative, semi-structured, retrospective interviews (e.g. Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse, CECA). This facilitates the narration of abuse history for systematic analysis in relation to clinical disorder. Interview techniques assist such history-telling, for example by ‘scaffolding’ the account, aiding memory through chronological questioning, using a factual focus and using probing questions to collect detail and resolve inconsistencies. However, some personal narratives are fragmented, incomplete, contradictory or highly emotional/dissociated from emotion. This can be explained by trauma impacts such as being emotionally frozen (forgetting and avoidance) or overwhelmed (emotional over-remembering) and is termed ‘unresolved trauma’ with links to attachment vulnerability. These narratives can make investigative interview research more challenging but can offer opportunities for secondary psycholinguistic analysis. Illustrative interview quotes from CECA childhood physical and sexual abuse narratives of three women are provided with comment on style of reporting. The women had recurrent trauma experience and later life depression and anxiety. The interview responses are examined in terms of seven characteristics taken from available literature (e.g. incoherent, contradictory, lack recall, time lapses, emotionality, blame and vividness). The concept of unresolved loss is discussed and whether the linguistic characteristics are specific to a trauma or to an individual. Factual investigative interviews and psycholinguistic analysis of narrative may find ways of combining for greater depth of understanding of unresolved trauma, to extend available methods and aid therapy.

Border Crossings Through the Eyes of a Female Narrator: Concept Border in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Literary Discourse

Many recent studies have focused on the depiction of BORDER from the point of view of cognitive linguistics, gender studies, cultural studies. However, little research has been undertaken to study the books for children that address questions of borderlands, territorial and metaphorical borders in historical and modern fiction among which is Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Series. The objective of this article is to study the portrayal of cultural concept BORDER from the perspective of a female child narrator in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s literary discourse, focusing on the depiction of territorial and metaphorical borders in order to establish the possible influences and interrelations. The multidisciplinary approach that combines the methods and former research findings of such disciplines as cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, border studies, discourse studies is implemented to determine the narrator model and the peculiarities of psychonarration in the book series; classify concept BORDER from the point of view of cognitive linguistics and restructure its components; provide an analysis of the figurative and associative layer of the cultural concept BORDER and examine the role of the verbalization of feelings and emotions in the portrayal of territorial and metaphorical border crossings in Wilder’s books. Overall, it is assumed that the female child narrator has been chosen by the author based on the psychological peculiarities of the target audience of the books. The results indicate that the combination of the external and internal forms of psychonarration ensures a clearer portrayal of the female perception of border crossings in the analyzed discourse. The territorial and metaphorical borders depicted in Wilder’s works are interwoven and influenced by historical, biographical, gender, and psychological peculiarities.

Narrative-Based Intervention and Emotional Intelligence in Female Children

Children share their emotional experiences through narratives, and high-quality narratives are beneficial for their wellbeing and development. This research investigated whether narrative-based interventions in the school context can increase children's emotional intelligence (EI). It tested three intervention settings' effect in their oral and written narrative elements: 1) oral co-narration, 2) literary narrative, and 3) Merging co-narrating and literary narrative. The sample consisted of 91 female Iranian students (age = ±12), who were selected randomly to these three intervention groups where they received a two-month training and one control conditions with treatment as usual. The Emotional Quotient inventory, the youth version (EQ-i: yv) test, was used to measure the students' EI levels before and after the intervention. The results demonstrated that oral and written narrative have different effects on student’s EI. The results revealed a significant increase in the EI score among children who participated in the oral co-narrating group and merged co-narrating and literary narrative intervention group. In contrast, the literary narrative intervention was not effective enough to increase children's EI. In conclusion, oral and written language modes and their merged narrative elements are crucial when tailoring effective school-based interventions to impact students' EI with language minority. Educators need to apply the oral and written narrative elements in their instructional design of the EI interventions considering the narrative style of students. In particular, oral language as the developmentally and socio-culturally appropriate tool can involve student's more with making sense of text and thereby support the learning process in EI interventions.

Transition Trauma Metaphor in Transgender Narrative

This study combines methodological tools of conceptual metaphor theory and narrative psychology with theoretical assumptions of the intersubjective psycholinguistic approach to meaning to explore instantiations of transition narrative metaphors in 16 TED talks given by transgender people and posted on the TED platform within the period between January 2013 and July 2020. The speakers are aged from 20 to 70; 8 males and 8 females; 2 black and 9 white Americans, 2 Filipinos, 1 black South-African, 1 Puerto Rican, and 1 white Australian. The study offers a new interpretation of narrative metaphor based on the intersubjective model of meaning. Within this model, narrative metaphor is conceived as extended conceptual metaphor instantiated in a number of multimodal metaphoric expressions made coherent by the textual, social, cultural, and historical context of the narrative, but primarily by its interactive situational context, which includes the audience into the narrative through empathy and gives them power to change the narrative. The research reveals that all the 16 analysed narratives rest on the TRANSITION IS CONTEST narrative metaphor that represents a conflict between positive self-evaluation of transition by a transgender individual and its negative evaluation / unacceptance by the society, which makes transition a traumatic experience. The density of words and phrases instantiating the CONTEST metaphor in the 16 narratives varies from 2,5 to 3 % which means that they are key linguistic expressions of the narratives. The CONTEST metaphor provides a deeper insight into transgender transition compared to the JOURNEY/TRAVEL metaphor found to represent transition experience in existing cognitive linguistic and transgender studies. The JOURNEY/TRAVEL metaphor fails to grasp the intersubjective and, consequently, traumatic nature of transition experience. The results of the research suggest that narrative as well as narrative metaphor can be given a more accurate interpretation if they are approached from the intersubjective perspective, which reflects their true nature as socially and culturally shaped interactive phenomena.

Perimenopausal Stress Reactions: A Qualitative Study on the Awareness of Spouses

Menopause is the complete cessation of the mentstrual cycle, which is caused by loss in the ovarian follicular activity. Women reach their non-reproductive years when they reach menopause. But the journey towards it is not that easy as it sounds. The transition period may take less or long time depending on individuals.The menopausal transition can be a period of stress, even lead to trauma if left unnoticed or unsupported. The menopausal transition period is called the perimenopausal period. Perimenopause is considered to be the period (3-8 years) before and after the final menstrual cycle. It is a phase in a woman's life that needs immense support and care from the spouse. But still, researchers are skeptical about the information men have regarding the period. Even though many studies highlight the physiological changes that happen during the perimenopausal or menopausal transition period, there is still a lack in the number of studies that emphasize the psychological difficulties women face in the perimenopausal period. Emotional support from the husband is of significance amid many such difficulties. For assisting, the spouse should be completely aware of what his wife is going through. The significance of the study lies here, as it focuses on the awareness of the spouses about the perimenopausal period. The study intends to investigate the level of awareness men have about the perimenopausal period.The study also attempts to find out how the spouses perceive themselves to have supported their wives during the perimenopausal period. The study followed a qualitative approach in data collection and analysis. The data was collected using a semi-structured interview. 34 men (spouses of perimenopausal women) from Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, and Thrissur districts of Kerala, India were selected using purposive sampling. The method of thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. For the analysis, the software NVivo was used. The final themes extracted were, unawareness, attitude, regret, and techniques to be adopted. The results revealed the unawareness majority of the participants had about the phase and throws light on the need to create awareness among men to help women cope better with the phase. Participants also reported the reasons they felt which led to this level of unawareness and how they felt there is a need to adopt many techniques which may help their wives cope better with the phase. The major reasons, the partcipants noted as reasons for their unawareness were, lack of information from the family, lack of communication from their spouses, which led to major confusions in them. From the results it could be understood that there is high level of unawareness among the participants regarding the perimenopausal period. There is a need to create awareness among men to understand the phase better to help their spouses cope better with the perimenopausal period.

Social Restrictions in the COVID-19 Pandemic As a Traumatic Experience: Psycholinguistic Markers

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of life including psychological well-being. Social restrictions, changes in habits, and permanent stay at home might have a negative impact on the psychological state of people. The purpose of our study is to conduct a psycholinguistic analysis of pandemic narratives to identify markers of traumatic experience and identify possible gender differences. The sample consisted of 167 respondents (72% females). The mean age of participants was 21.09 years (SD = 4.52). The study was conducted in Ukraine online in 2020, during the second wave of lockdown. The audience was asked to write a narrative on “How my life changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personal experience”. As a result, we have found psycholinguistic markers that confirm the traumatic experience. Among them were the markers of time, depersonalization, and affective processes. A clear distinction of experience before and after the pandemic was detected in the narratives. This is characteristic of traumatic experience. In samples, such a distinction is made using the words “was” and “became”. The psychological marker of affective processes indicates immersion in a traumatic event. This discomposure is reflected in the manifestation of negative emotions through the words “bad”, “problems”, “critical”, and “difficult”. The main semantic markers in pandemic narratives are time and life. The life marker was meaningfully represented by stories about social limitations and physical health. Distinctions in pandemic descriptions of men and women have been revealed as psycholinguistic and semantic markers are different. Narratives of women are larger, they use more words (pronouns, adverbs and conjunctions, interrogatives and quantifiers) than men. Regarding content, men are more likely to talk about affective processes, while women − about social and biological ones. Our study is a maiden attempt to reflect on the pandemic as a traumatic event within the collective experience.

Preface: Understanding Women’s Lives and Trauma Through Narrative Research and Analysis

Welcome to this special issue titled “Women’s Life and Trauma in Individual and Collective Narratives” of the East European Journal of Psycholinguistics. Narratives, both oral and written, play an important role in helping the individual make sense of their lives and the world they live in. Narrative research is focused on the elicitation and interpretation of people’s narrative accounts of their lived experiences. In recent decades, there has been an enormous growth in the use of narrative inquiry and narrative-based research with diverse theoretical orientations and methodologies grounded in various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities including anthropology, psychology, psycholinguistics, sociology, history and literary studies as well as in medicine and clinical research (Chase, 2005, 2011; Holstein & Gubrium, 2012; Kleinman, 1988; Charon, 2006). According to Chase (2005), most narrative researchers treat narrative as a distinctive form of discourse that shapes meaning through the concerted ordering of story material with speakers providing particular understandings of personal action and experiences by organizing events and objects into meaningful patterns, connecting subjects, actions, events, and their consequences over time. As narrative research has become increasingly complex and rigorous, this special issue was planned to gain insight into the narrative research being conducted by international scholars with a focus on women and trauma, broadly defined. The call for papers attracted many high-quality submissions from authors representing various countries. The special issue contains a collection of ten papers, each providing a unique perspective and understanding of trauma in women’s lives and its reflection in narrative inquiry. Just as women’s voices are varied, so too are the narratives presented. Women are represented as narrators; as subjects of the narration and as characters in the narrative. The authors also present a broad spectrum of approaches to the empirical analysis of narrative material ranging from social media content, life stories, clinical and educational interventions, and literary works. In the first paper of the special issue, Bifulco’s article seeks to explore links between selected investigative child abuse interview accounts using narratives elicited through the Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse (CECA) clinical interview guide and analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Counts (LIWC) text analysis programme (Francis & Pennebaker, 1992) which identifies characteristics of speech associated with trauma. Her paper examines the potential of combining these approaches to systematically analyze and interpret trauma narratives. In the second article, the contextual backdrop for the narratives is the COVID-19 pandemic. In her article, Kostruba analyzes narratives collected online to gain an understanding of how specific social restrictions, stay-at-home orders particular to the pandemic affected all aspects of life including psychological well-being. Her study also used LIWC psycholinguistic analysis of these current pandemic narratives to identify markers of traumatic experience and identify possible gender differences in the ways women experienced (and continue to experience) the COVID-19 global pandemic. The importance of social and cultural context is apparent in the next article which draws on literary texts as the source material. For Aguilar Lopez & Miguel Borge, the drama The Gold Ribbon by María Manuela Reina, written and situated in the 1980s, a decade that for Spain implied a more obvious abandonment of the most traditional conceptions of the role of women, serves as the unit of analysis. The authors describe the divergent worldview models of the older versus younger characters, reflecting both a generational and gender divide around topics such as success, infidelity, and matrimony. Aguilar Lopez & Miguel Borge aim to identify if, how and why the dramatist is able to reach out to the general public through her play to create social awareness and give voice to the women who rebelled against the traditional social and gender roles. The next paper in this series focuses on the emerging field of post-traumatic growth (PTG) defined by Tedeschi & Calhoun (2004) as a “positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging circumstances.” Drawing on therapeutic narratives from women participating in a psychotherapy workshop, Lushyn & Sukhenko utilize dialectical understanding and discourse analysis to identify and assess the women’s descriptions and definitions associated with post-traumatic development and growth with a further attempt to provide practical implications for psychological practice. A set of the articles (#5-7) in this special issue target traumas associated with transition, be it gender transition or women and girls transitioning to another life phase (adolescence; menopause) and the emotional, social and cultural experiences connected to these transitions. Martynyuk’s article combines methodological tools of conceptual metaphor theory and narrative psychology with theoretical assumptions of the intersubjective psycholinguistic approach to meaning making and exploring transgender transition narrative metaphors. Her dataset consists of 16 TED talks videos by transgender individuals discussing their experiences of transitioning which provide Martynyuk the opportunity to conduct a narrative and visual analysis of the metaphors that are given coherence by the textual, social, cultural, and historical context of the narrative, as well as by the interactive situational context reflected in the video recordings. The article by Nair & George puts the menopausal woman as the focus of the narrative inquiry. The authors interviewed a group of male spouses about their knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about perimenopause and their experiences associated with the physical, psychological, and social changes occurring in the lives of their wives. The menopausal transition can be a period of stress, even lead to trauma if left unnoticed or unsupported. Nair & George used qualitative data software to analyze the interview data and thematic analysis to arrive at themes which could inform programs which could raise awareness about the perimenopausal and menopausal life stages of women to help both partners understand and cope with the individual, family and societal changes which occur during this life period. On the opposite end of the life spectrum, Shirazi et al, investigate whether narrative-based interventions in the school context can increase children’s emotional intelligence (EI) and whether oral and written narrative elements have a different effect on students' EI. The underlying premise is that children share their emotional experiences through narratives and stories and high-quality narratives are beneficial for children’s wellbeing and development. The research project was conducted with almost one hundred 12-year old Iranian girls who attend Yasuj city schools in southwestern Iran. Results highlighted the importance of oral and combined oral/written language modes and their merged narrative elements on the development of emotional intelligence, particularly for children who are in the language minority. The final set of articles (#8-10) make use of nostalgia and intergenerational narratives of historical trauma. Todorova & Padareva-Ilieva apply an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach to describe and classify written messages and images collected through social media in Bulgaria during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Findings revealed that much of the communications through social media during that period was largely nostalgic and that the main role of the Facebook social media platform is to unite people in times of isolation, to raise their spirit and save them from the traumatic experience they may encounter during a global health crisis. Zaporozhets & Stodolinska analyze the concept of border through a content analysis of the Little House children’s book series which are narrated from the lived experiences and perspective of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family in the United States in the late 1800s. The territorial and metaphorical borders depicted in Wilder’s works are interwoven and influenced by her reminiscences of historical, biographical, gender, and psychological peculiarities. This journal issue concludes with a cross-cultural analysis of narrative reflections associated with two 20th century genocides: the Holodomor in Ukraine (1932-1933), and the Holocaust (1939-1944). Zasiekina et al recruited second (“mothers”) and third (“daughters”) generations of Holodomor and Holocaust descendants in Ukraine and Israel to share their family narratives and experiences of the genocide. The study applied inductive thematic analyses that progressed from description to interpretation, and showed the centrality of five emerging themes in both mothers’ and daughters’ narratives. The findings of their research have important implications for future practice of creating narratives with survivors of massive trauma and their offspring and stress the importance of creating a traumatic narrative to aid the healing process resulting from the transmission of historical and collective trauma and provides direction for clinical providers in designing treatment plans for individuals with genocide in their life history. In summary, the articles that make up this special journal issue reinforce the view that narrative research and inquiry provides researchers and clinicians multiple lenses and approaches through which to analyze and interpret narrative data. The subsequent results of each narrative analysis can give voice to a broad range of women and girls, while at the same time guide policy and inform educational interventions and therapeutic programs.

Forgotten Stories of Women: Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma of Holodomor and Holocaust Survivors’ Offspring

The aims of the study were to examine intergenerational effects of two cultural contexts of massive genocide: the Holodomor 1932-1933 in Ukraine, and the Holocaust 1939-1944 on the second and third generations of women in Ukraine and Israel. Forty women participants were recruited for four focus groups, two in each country, comprised of 10 participants each, using a snowball method in both countries. The second-generation groups were named as “the mothers’ group”, and the third-generation group (comprised of daughters of the mothers’ groups) were named as “the daughters’ group”. Inclusion criteria for sampling were: (a) being female above 18 years old, and (b) having family experience of the Famine 1932-1933 / Holocaust during 1939-1944. The groups were moderated by two experienced psychologists in each of the countries. The participants were presented with seven semi-structured questions and were asked to share their family narratives and experiences of the genocide. The study applied inductive thematic analyses that progressed from description to interpretation, for key themes that emerged during the groups’ sessions. The results of the study showed the centrality of five emerging themes in both mothers’ and daughters’ narratives, including: “emotions and feelings of experiencing genocide, “attitudes toward food and starvation”, “sense of losses and death”, “transgenerational transmission of trauma in family narratives”, and “ethnic identity”. The cross-cultural perspective of the current research shed light on the similarities and differences between the traumatic narratives constructed by the offspring of the second and the third generations in the two contexts of Ukraine and Israel. The Ukrainian women attributed greater importance of commemoration of Holodomor victims as part of an effective coping strategy with trauma, while the Israeli women put more emphasis on the attitude of asceticism that was inherited from the Holocaust survivors. The cross-cultural clinical and educational implications are discussed.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Post-Traumatic Growth in Dialectical Perspective: Implications for Practice

This article provides the conceptualization of the post-traumatic development (PTD) in terms of a dialectical unity of the processes of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and post-traumatic growth (PTG); practical implications for eco-centered facilitation of post-traumatic growth and development. The results of the research indicate that the process of personality development is paradoxical, irreversible and scarcely predictable. In dialectical perspective the attractor of change is not about the content of transient forms (such as trauma, success, flow) but the stabilization of their change: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. As compared to PTG, PTD’s outcome is the systemic transition to the novel (not better or positive) identity. PTSD as well as PTG constitute minor cycles within the major cycle of PTD. The core metaphor of change as personality development is the work of the immunity system (SPI) which has an ambivalent nature: on the one hand, it defends the personality from the influence of adversarial agents and on the other – proactively guards it from stagnation and lack of confrontation and discontinuity. Principals of PTD facilitation: (a) the situation of psychological help (PH) is a case of a transition to a social level of personality self-regulation; (b) an inquiry for PH contains a narrative with necessary and sufficient elements for post-traumatic growth and development; (c) these elements are objectified in paradoxes, contradictions, incongruences as the source of personality development; (d) the task of PTD facilitator is to support the explication of internal change programs by maintaining the position of ambiguity tolerance and sensitivity to accidental flow of events.