Be coherent and become heard: The multidimensional impact of narrative coherence on listeners’ social responses

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that sharing autobiographical memories in a coherent manner has a beneficial impact on consequent social reactions of listeners. In this experimental study, we were able to replicate earlier findings by demonstrating that listeners (N = 107) showed significantly more willingness to interact with, more social support towards, and a more positive attitude towards coherent than incoherent narrators. Remarkably, these beneficial effects of coherence were observed only for narratives about positive memories. Results are explained in the light of the relevance of positive memories for the social bonding function of autobiographical memory. Furthermore, earlier work was extended and refined by investigating effects of the individual constituting dimensions of coherence (context, chronology, theme) on social responses. In line with our predictions, the dimensions of chronology and theme were most important in impacting social responses of listeners. Possibly a reduction of the attraction effect due to increased effortful processing and reduced credibility due to insufficient emotional elaboration might explain these results respectively. Furthermore, social responses were worse when narratives were incoherent with regard to more than one dimension, in line with the expected additive effect. Overall, fully incoherent narratives, which had had low scores on context, chronology, and theme, had the most adverse effect on listeners’ social responses. This study adds significantly to the domain of memory and cognition by showing how cognitive psychological research would benefit from extending a merely intrapersonal perspective to include an interpersonal perspective that considers social implications of memory and cognition as well.

Narrative coherence predicts emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: a two-year longitudinal study

“…Therefore, the relation between narrative coherence and social support might have been weaker in this study than has been observed previously. Prior longitudinal research, although over a shorter time interval of 5 months (Vanaken et al, submitted), as well as prior experimental research (Vanaken & Hermans, 2020;Vanaken et al, 2020a) provides convincing empirical evidence for the idea that narrative coherence predicts and may even lead to more social support.…”

“…Total narrative coherence (0-9) at each time point was calculated by taking the mean of the scores for positive (0-9) and negative (0-9) narratives. However, based on previous work suggesting differences between positive and negative narratives (Baker-Ward et al, 2005;Fivush et al, 2003Fivush et al, , 2008Vanaken & Hermans, 2020;Vanderveren et al, 2019), not only total coherence but also the coherence of positive and negative narratives were taken into account separately. Thirty percent of narratives at T1 were independently scored by two trained coders of whom one was the first author.…”

“…Also, Burnell et al (2010) showed, in a sample of veterans, that narrative coherence was positively related to pleasant communication with their family and that the more incoherent veterans were, the more they found communication to be unsatisfactory. Finally, there is recent experimental evidence that speakers who narrate coherently receive more positive social responses from listeners (like social support), in comparison to incoherent narrators (Vanaken & Hermans, 2020;Vanaken et al, 2020a). However, in one study, this effect emerged only for narratives about positive life experiences (high points), whereas for negative narratives (low points) there was no difference in social support depending on the coherence of the narratives (Vanaken & Hermans, 2020).…”

“…Finally, there is recent experimental evidence that speakers who narrate coherently receive more positive social responses from listeners (like social support), in comparison to incoherent narrators (Vanaken & Hermans, 2020;Vanaken et al, 2020a). However, in one study, this effect emerged only for narratives about positive life experiences (high points), whereas for negative narratives (low points) there was no difference in social support depending on the coherence of the narratives (Vanaken & Hermans, 2020). Still, there is emerging evidence that social support garnered form narrating coherently to others may play a role in how narrative coherence leads to better emotional outcome.…”

How am I going to tell you this? The relations between social anxiety and narrative coherence

“…In addition, narrative coherence has also been shown to be positively related to having high-quality social relationships and to experiencing less negative social interactions (Burnell et al, 2010;Vanaken & Hermans, 2020a;Waters & Fivush, 2015). In experimental work, sharing memories in an incoherent manner, has shown to evoke more negative social evaluations from listeners, than doing so in a coherent manner (Vanaken et al, 2020;Vanaken & Hermans, 2020b). Given that narrative coherence develops in early social interactions, and particularly through elaborative mother-child reminiscing, it is not surprising that a poorly developed ability to share autobiographical memories with others in a coherent manner, has an enduring effect on the quality of social relationships throughout life (Fivush, 2011;Fivush et al, 2006;Nelson & Fivush, 2004).…”