Narrative or self-feeling? A historical note on the biological foundation of the “depressive situation”

Rzesnitzek, Lara

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00009

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…They postulate that it is unlikely to be affected by changes in one's environment. In contrast to both authors, we follow a long tradition in descriptive psychopathology (e.g., Rzesnitzek, 2014;Scharfetter, 1980) and work on life disruptions which take complaints of feeling discontinuous with one's earlier self seriously. Thus, when the three mentioned habitual, highly routinized ways of sustaining a sense of selfcontinuity fail, less automatic and more intentional compensatory efforts are required.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity

Habermas

Köber

2014

Memory

114

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Personal identity depends on synchronic coherence and diachronic continuity of the self. Autobiographical remembering and autobiographical knowledge as well as the stability of bodily integrity, of social roles, of significant others and of physical and sociocultural environment have been suggested as supporting a pre-reflective sense of self-continuity. Stark biographical discontinuities or disruptions in these areas may destabilise the sense of self-continuity. To test the hypothesis that autobiographical reasoning in life narratives helps to compensate the effects of biographical discontinuities on the sense of self-continuity, life narratives of a lifespan sample with the ages of 16, 20, 24, 28, 44 and 69 (N = 150, 78 female) were investigated. Results confirm that if, and only if there have been biographical disruptions in the past four years, then autobiographical reasoning correlates positively with a sense of self-continuity. The findings contradict the thesis that mere remembering of past episodes is sufficient to maintain a sense of self-continuity under conditions of biographical change.

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confidence: 97%

Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity

Habermas

Köber

2014

Memory

114

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“…As evidenced, the more participants felt psychologically distressed, the greater was their sense of self-discontinuity ( Table 2 ). This confirms that psychological distress and the sense of selfhood are interconnected, probably mutually impairing each other once either psychological well-being or the sense of self-continuity is disturbed ( Chandler et al, 2003 ; Rzesnitzek, 2014 ). The greater sense of self-discontinuity was specifically related to greater frequencies of intrusive memories and emotional hyperarousal, corroborating the crucial role of autobiographical memory for the continuous sense of self ( Conway et al, 2004 ; Bluck and Liao, 2013 ) but also for the maintenance of trauma-related symptoms ( Berntsen et al, 2003 ; Berntsen, 2009 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Autobiographical Meaning Making Protects the Sense of Self-Continuity Past Forced Migration

Camia

Zafar

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Forced migration changes people’s lives and their sense of self-continuity fundamentally. One memory-based mechanism to protect the sense of self-continuity and psychological well-being is autobiographical meaning making, enabling individuals to explain change in personality and life by connecting personal experiences and other distant parts of life to the self and its development. Aiming to replicate and extend prior research, the current study investigated whether autobiographical meaning making has the potential to support the sense of self-continuity in refugees. We therefore collected life narratives from 31 refugees that were coded for autobiographical reasoning, self-event connections, and global narrative coherence. In line with prior research, results suggest that autobiographical meaning making relates to a higher sense of self-continuity and less psychological distress. Yet, if refugees experienced many continuing postdisplacement stressors in addition to their forced displacement, autobiographical meaning making was associated with higher self-discontinuity and greater psychological distress, especially with trauma-related symptoms such as memory intrusion and hyperarousal. Altogether, results indicate that autobiographical meaning making helps to compensate the effects of extreme biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity, as long as the stress caused by the biographical change is not overwhelming or too protracted.

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“…see commentaries in [19]), based on long-standing concerns that latent variable approaches can be conceptually, statistically and empirically ambiguous [20–24]. The central criticisms are that: (i) latent variables are often represented as fixed entities, failing to portray the dynamics of individual patterns of behaviours and the variability or lack of unidimensionality in psychological variables [23,25,26], (ii) observed behaviours are treated as passive and exchangeable indicators of the particular latent state [27,28], (iii) finding realizations of latent variables in biological organization (e.g. intelligence) [22] is challenging and, more conceptually, (iv) latent variables are unobservable by definition [28,29], promoting circularity in definitions of psychological phenomena (‘verbal magic’) [21] and leading to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [30].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using network analysis to study behavioural phenotypes: an example using domestic dogs

et al. 2016

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Phenotypic integration describes the complex interrelationships between organismal traits, traditionally focusing on morphology. Recently, research has sought to represent behavioural phenotypes as composed of quasi-independent latent traits. Concurrently, psychologists have opposed latent variable interpretations of human behaviour, proposing instead a network perspective envisaging interrelationships between behaviours as emerging from causal dependencies. Network analysis could also be applied to understand integrated behavioural phenotypes in animals. Here, we assimilate this cross-disciplinary progression of ideas by demonstrating the use of network analysis on survey data collected on behavioural and motivational characteristics of police patrol and detection dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). Networks of conditional independence relationships illustrated a number of functional connections between descriptors, which varied between dog types. The most central descriptors denoted desirable characteristics in both patrol and detection dog networks, with ‘Playful’ being widely correlated and possessing mediating relationships between descriptors. Bootstrap analyses revealed the stability of network results. We discuss the results in relation to previous research on dog personality, and benefits of using network analysis to study behavioural phenotypes. We conclude that a network perspective offers widespread opportunities for advancing the understanding of phenotypic integration in animal behaviour.

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Narrative or self-feeling? A historical note on the biological foundation of the “depressive situation”

Cited by 8 publications

References 12 publications

Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity

Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity

Autobiographical Meaning Making Protects the Sense of Self-Continuity Past Forced Migration

Using network analysis to study behavioural phenotypes: an example using domestic dogs

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