This study explores the cultured understanding of mental health and mental illnesses among members of Generation Y in China through a narrative approach. Five prominent narratives are identified through the analysis of stories about mental illnesses collected through semistructured interviews with college students. These five narratives feature the tragic genius, the psychotic criminal, the fra...

This study identified and described adolescents’ exclusion rules and how they were related to their real world exclusionary behaviours. Adolescents (N5682) were asked to provide (a) an account and rationale for excluding a peer who wanted to join their group; and (b) general rules for when exclusion was fair. A content analysis of the narratives suggested seven rejection rules that were somewha...

Substantial parts of the Hebrew Bible reflect awareness of, and significant interaction with Greek culture. Homeric epic should be reconsidered for its possible impact on narratives in B ...

The Internet has often been envisioned as a technological utopia, framed by the rhetoric of hope. However, after studying the popular discourse, three meta-narratives are identified: utopian narratives containing the pro-innovation position; dystopian narratives containing the anti-diffusion position; technology-as-risk narratives containing the control position. While narratives of anti-diffus...

This paper is concerned with the investigation of direct speech in Greek narratives. More specifically, the aim of this paper is to examine how the producers of oral narratives present themselves as interactional protagonists via direct speech representation in personal stories. In particular, this study focuses on the use of direct speech within the conversational narratives of Greek adolescen...

Narratives are powerful because of their impact on our emotional experiences. Recent years have witnessed significant advances in affective computing and intelligent interaction, presenting a broad range of opportunities for enhancing the design, implementation, and adaptivity of interactive narratives. This paper presents preliminary work examining story-centric games and interactive narrative...

Little is known about correspondence between parents’ and children’s narratives after a child’s exposure to trauma. We examined 24 parent and child narratives of a child’s recovery using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a software program that yields the percentage of words that fall into linguistic categories (e.g., personal pronouns) and psychological categories (e.g., emotion words). Analy...

In this qualitative study, we explored how students understood "culture." Participants defined culture and wrote narratives regarding specific cultural encounters. The sample comprised both nursing (n=14) and non-nursing (n=8) students to allow for comparison groups. Content analysis of the narratives revealed two broad paradigms of cultural understanding: essentialist and constructivist. Essen...

We investigate what distinguishes reported dreams from other personal narratives. The continuity hypothesis, stemming from psychological dream analysis work, states that most dreams refer to a person’s daily life and personal concerns, similar to other personal narratives such as diary entries. Differences between the two texts may reveal the linguistic markers of dream text, which could be the...

We are investigating the feasibility and effectiveness of establishing a library of patient narratives to inform patient-centered research in the U.S. Veterans Affairs organization. Using qualitative methods, we conducted a needs assessment of 15 researchers and then interviewed and videotaped 11 veterans with traumatic brain injury or diabetes. We developed a method for displaying the narrativ...