Narrative social psychology

Social psychologists argue that people’s past weighs on their present (e.g. Liu and Hilton, 2005). The present chapter intends to show that language, particularly narrative language is an extremely useful device so as to trace the impact of past experiences on current psychological conditions. We will first review some basic tenets of narrative psychology. In the next section, we will contrast the social cognitive approach to language with that of the narrative approach emphasizing that whereas social cognition conceives language as mediator of social perception, narrative psychology in general and narrative social psychology in particular are interested in linguistic expressions of individual and group identity. We will also demonstrate that current studies on group based emotions (intergroup emotions, e.g. Smith (1993), or collective emotions, e.g. Doosje et al., 1998) can also be placed in the framework of narrative-linguistic analysis. A contrast between the universalistic social cognitive approach to self and self-categorization and the more relativistic stance of the narrative social psychology to narratively constructed personal identity and historically constructed group identity will also be discussed.The forthcoming section will outline the concepts and methods we have developed for studying quantitatively the processes and states of personal and group identity. Finally, an application of the analytic devices to the Hungarian national identity with particular respect to the elaboration of historical traumas will be presented.