NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AS SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR FOR STUDYING IDENTITY STATES OF INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS

Narratives are generally conceived as accounts of events, which involve some temporal and/or causal coherence. Recently, a new direction of narrative psychology has emerged, which draws on the scientific traditions of psychological study, but adds to the existing theories by pursuing the empirical study of psychological meaning construction (Laszlo, 2008). Scientific narrative psychology takes seriously the interrelations between language and human psychological processes or narrative and identity. This is what discriminates it from earlier psychometric studies, which established correlations between language use and psychological states (Pennebaker and King 1999; Pennebaker et al. 2003). It assumes that studying narratives as vehicles of complex psychological contents leads to empirically based knowledge about human social adaptation. Individuals in their life stories, just like groups in their group histories, compose their significant life episodes. In this composition, which is meaning construction in itself, they express the ways in which they organize their relations to the social world, or construct their identity. Organizational characters and experiential qualities of these stories tell about the potential behavioral adaptation and the coping capacities of the storytellers.