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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mixed Emotional Experience Is Associated With And Precedes Improvements In Psychological Well-Being, Jonathan Adler, Hal Hershfield
Mixed Emotional Experience Is Associated With And Precedes Improvements In Psychological Well-Being, Jonathan Adler, Hal Hershfield
Jonathan M. Adler
Background The relationships between positive and negative emotional experience and physical and psychological well-being have been well-documented. The present study examines the prospective positive relationship between concurrent positive and negative emotional experience and psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy. Methods 47 adults undergoing psychotherapy completed measures of psychological well-being and wrote private narratives that were coded by trained raters for emotional content. Results The specific concurrent experience of happiness and sadness was associated with improvements in psychological well-being above and beyond the impact of the passage of time, personality traits, or the independent effects of happiness and sadness. Changes …
Developmental And Narrative Perspectives On Religious And Spiritual Identity Development For Clinicians, Paul Wink, Jonathan Adler, Michele Dillon
Developmental And Narrative Perspectives On Religious And Spiritual Identity Development For Clinicians, Paul Wink, Jonathan Adler, Michele Dillon
Jonathan M. Adler
Identity gives an individual a sense of sameness and continuity (Erikson, 1968) and provides answers to questions about the nature, purpose, and meaning of life (Kiesling, Sorell, Montgomery, & Colwell, 2006). William James (1910/1968) placed spiritual identity, encompassing intellectual, moral, and emotional development at the center of personality. Given that the search for personal meaning is a vital component of a person's identity, it is not surprising that religion and spirituality play a key role in the identity development of many Americans.
Personality And The Coherence Of Psychotherapy Narratives, Jonathan Adler, Joshua Wagner, Dan Mcadams
Personality And The Coherence Of Psychotherapy Narratives, Jonathan Adler, Joshua Wagner, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
The stories people construct about themselves and their social worlds are key aspects of their identities [Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100–122]. Whereas certain expected life experiences (e.g., leaving home, getting a job) may be relatively easy to narrate, more unexpected and difficult events, such as undergoing psychotherapy, may pose a challenge to successful narration. Yet it is especially important to successfully narrate one’s experience in psychotherapy in order to maintain the gains from treatment [Frank, J. D. (1961). …
The Successful Treatment Of Specific Phobia In A College Counseling Center, Jonathan Adler, Robin Cook-Nobles
The Successful Treatment Of Specific Phobia In A College Counseling Center, Jonathan Adler, Robin Cook-Nobles
Jonathan M. Adler
Specific phobias are highly prevalent among college students and can be quite debilitating. However, students often do not present for treatment for phobias and, when they do, often do not receive effective treatment. This article will present a case study of the effective treatment of specific phobia using cognitive-behavioral therapy with an emphasis on in vivo exposure. It will provide a template for how to conduct this efficient and effective therapy and suggest several benefits of incorporating this treatment into the repertoire offered by a college counseling center.
Telling Stories About Therapy: Ego Development, Well-Being, And The Therapeutic Relationship, Jonathan Adler, Dan Mcadams
Telling Stories About Therapy: Ego Development, Well-Being, And The Therapeutic Relationship, Jonathan Adler, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
We need narratives of relationships to understand them precisely because relationships have idiosyncratic meanings in a life. The authors looked at one of the best-researched and documented relationships within psychology--that of the psychotherapy relationship--and investigated the different ways in which this relationship is retrospectively narrated by different groups of people. They discovered that people high in ego development but low in well-being featured the therapeutic relationship prominently in their stories whereas those at high levels of both deemphasized the role of their therapist in their narratives. In this chapter, the authors raise questions about the narrative patterns of relational dynamics …
How Does Personality Develop?, Dan Mcadams, Jonathan Adler
How Does Personality Develop?, Dan Mcadams, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
There are good reasons to be skeptical about any efforts to bring together two fields of inquiry that have historically had little to do with each other - that is, personality psychology and the study of human development. Personality psychologists are by training, and maybe even temperament, suspicious of the idea of development, for to them it means change (i.s. instability, inconsistency), and personality is nothing if it is not at least somewhat enduring. Developmentalists, on the other hand, specialize in a certain kind of change - meaningful and orderly change over time.
Autobiographical Memory And The Construction Of A Narrative Identity: Theory, Research, And Clinical Implications, Dan Mcadams, Jonathan Adler
Autobiographical Memory And The Construction Of A Narrative Identity: Theory, Research, And Clinical Implications, Dan Mcadams, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
Going back to Freud, cliniciants have listened to, tried to understand, and tried to change the stories their patients tell them. Different therapeutic approaches have tended to privilege different kinds of stories to suggest different strategies interpretation and intervention. Classic psychoanalysis, for example, has traditionally sought to unmask the disguised meanings of manifest dream narratives. Carl Rogers taught an emphatic stance toward life narrative: Therapists were to encourage and affirm their clients' autobiographical recollections, holding back critical judgment and expressing the necessary unconditional positive regard through which a client might eventually actualize the good inner self.
The Role Of Personality In Psychotherapy For Anxiety And Depression, Richard Zinbarg, Amanda Uliaszek, Jonathan Adler
The Role Of Personality In Psychotherapy For Anxiety And Depression, Richard Zinbarg, Amanda Uliaszek, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
A trait approach to personality has many implications for psychotherapy. Given that traits contribute to the expression of symptoms of common psychiatric disorders, are moderately heritable, and relatively stable (yet also dynamic to some extent), long-term change in symptoms is possible but is likely to be limited. Analogous to the manner in which genes set the reaction range for phenotype, standing on certain traits may set the patient's “therapeutic range.” On the other hand, some of the same traits that may limit the depth of therapeutic benefits might also increase their breadth. In addition, taking the patient's standing on different …
The Most Important Fiction, Jonathan Adler
The Most Important Fiction, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
We are all protagonists in our own life story - and also the narrator. Crafting this most important fiction holds the key to real happiness. Especially in the wake of adversity.
The Political Is Personal: Narrating 9/11 And Psychological Well-Being, Jonathan Adler, Michael Poulin
The Political Is Personal: Narrating 9/11 And Psychological Well-Being, Jonathan Adler, Michael Poulin
Jonathan M. Adler
Making meaning out of negative experiences is one of the primary psychological challenges in the wake of adversity. Much of the empirical attention that psychologists have paid to meaning making has focused on personal hardships, but national tragedies similarly pose a challenge to meaning making. In the present study, which is grounded in the theoretical tradition of the narrative study of lives, a nationally representative sample of 395 adults wrote accounts about the 9/11 terrorist attacks approximately 2 months after 9/11. Accounts were coded for 3 narrative themes: closure, redemption, and contamination. Psychological well-being was significantly related to accounts that …
Rising To The Challenge Of Identifying And Analyzing Clients’ Narratives, Jonathan Adler
Rising To The Challenge Of Identifying And Analyzing Clients’ Narratives, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
Psychotherapy researchers and clinicians alike are faced with two primary challenges in the service of most effectively understanding the therapeutic process: first, they must identify the most generative elements from the rich flow of therapeutic dialogue; and second, they must select the most appropriate and productive tools for analyzing them. Singer and Bonalume (2010) have developed the Coding System for Autobiographical Memory Narratives in Psychotherapy (CS-AMNP), a trans-theoretical method for rising to these two challenges. In this commentary, the CS-AMNP is evaluated: its noteworthy contributions are highlighted, its potential limitations are discussed, and fruitful expansions are proposed in terms of …
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy, Jonathan Adler, Dan Mcadams
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy, Jonathan Adler, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
Going to psychotherapy represents an atypical, usually unanticipated, and often emotionally significant experience in the life course. As with many such events, people construct stories about therapy experiences in order to make sense out of them and to provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose. Yet beyond these purposes, the storying of psychotherapy is also central to the maintenance of the therapeutic gains achieved during the course of treatment (e.g., Frank, 1961; Spence, 1982). In the present study, the psychotherapy stories of 76 community adults are assessed using grounded theory methodology to determine narrative patterns that distinguish …
Two Modes Of Thought: The Narrative/Paradigmatic Disconnect In The Bailey Book Controversy, Jonathan Adler
Two Modes Of Thought: The Narrative/Paradigmatic Disconnect In The Bailey Book Controversy, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
Alice Dreger’s compelling history of the controversy surrounding J. Michael Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, presents two opposing camps, each entrenched in aseemingly intractable and incompatible position. On one side are proponents of Blanchard’s theory and the scientific research supporting it that served as the basis for Bailey’s book. The theory suggests that a certain segment of natal men who undergo sex reassignment surgery to become women do so out of an autogynephilic sexual orientation—an erotic attraction to the idea of themselves as women. On the other side are the transwomen who strongly object to the theory, …
Encouraging Epistemological Exploration: Impacts On Undergraduates' Retention And Application Of Course Material, Jonathan Adler, Elizabeth Matthews
Encouraging Epistemological Exploration: Impacts On Undergraduates' Retention And Application Of Course Material, Jonathan Adler, Elizabeth Matthews
Jonathan M. Adler
Students bring an intact, if unarticulated, epistemological perspective into the classroom that influences how they receive and process new information. In this study, students who explored a wider range of perspectives had significantly improved learning outcomes as measured in 3 domains: retention of specific content, retention of general themes, and application of the course content to other courses, mass media information, and their sense of self.
Epistemological Tension In The Future Of Personality Disorder Diagnosis, Jonathan Adler
Epistemological Tension In The Future Of Personality Disorder Diagnosis, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
To the Editor: In August 2011, the DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders Work Group posted an update presenting a hybrid dimensional-categorical model that attempts to embrace cutting-edge personality science while increasing clinical applicability and utility. These two aims pull in somewhat different directions, with personality science roughly represented by the dimensional component of the proposed model and clinical application and utility roughly represented by the categorical side. Pending field testing, this hybrid model may represent the future of personality disorder diagnosis. If so, it will not only transform DSM, but it will also reveal a deep epistemological tension in the …
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy And Psychological Health, Jonathan Adler, Lauren Skalina, Dan Mcadams
The Narrative Reconstruction Of Psychotherapy And Psychological Health, Jonathan Adler, Lauren Skalina, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
When people complete psychotherapy, they carry the story of the experience with them. This retrospective reconstruction serves several psychological purposes, including contributing to narrative identity and influencing the maintenance of therapeutic gains after termination. Based on a prior qualitative investigation of therapy narratives (Adler & McAdams, 2007a), a new sample of 104 former clients wrote about their psychotherapy after treatment end. Quantitative analyses indicated that the retrospective narratives of participants high in subjective well-being focused on the protagonist's agency in struggling with a discrete problem. In addition, the narratives of participants high in ego development described a coherent story of …
Emerging From The Cave: Attributional Style And The Narrative Study Of Identity In Midlife Adults, Jonathan Adler, Emily Kissel, Dan Mcadams
Emerging From The Cave: Attributional Style And The Narrative Study Of Identity In Midlife Adults, Jonathan Adler, Emily Kissel, Dan Mcadams
Jonathan M. Adler
It has been widely documented that individuals who explain negative life events with a depressogenic attributional style (stable, global attributions) tend to have increased rates of depression and other poor outcomes (e.g., Sweeny, Anderson, & Bailey, 1986). The Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) is a method of assessing attributional style in spontaneously-generated causal attributions appearing in accounts of real events (Peterson, Schulman, Castellon, & Seligman, 1992). Seventy life story interviews obtained from a diverse community sample of midlife adults were coded for attributional style with the CAVE technique and also for the theme of contamination (scenes in which good …
Living Into The Story: Agency And Coherence In A Longitudinal Study Of Narrative Identity Development And Mental Health Over The Course Of Psychotherapy, Jonathan M. Adler
Living Into The Story: Agency And Coherence In A Longitudinal Study Of Narrative Identity Development And Mental Health Over The Course Of Psychotherapy, Jonathan M. Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
Narrative identity is the internalized, evolving story of the self that each person crafts to provide his or her life with a sense of purpose and unity. A proliferation of empirical research studies focused on narrative identity have explored its relationship with psychological well-being. The present study is the first prospective, multiwave longitudinal investigation to examine short-term personality change via an emphasis on narrative identity as it relates to mental health. Forty-seven adults wrote rich personal narratives prior to beginning psychotherapy and after every session over 12 assessment points while concurrently completing a measure of mental health. Narratives were coded …
The Distinguishing Characteristics Of Narrative Identity In Adults With Features Of Borderline Personality Disorder: An Empirical Investigation, Jonathan Adler, Erica Chin, Aiswarya Kolisetty, Thomas Oltmanns
The Distinguishing Characteristics Of Narrative Identity In Adults With Features Of Borderline Personality Disorder: An Empirical Investigation, Jonathan Adler, Erica Chin, Aiswarya Kolisetty, Thomas Oltmanns
Jonathan M. Adler
While identity disturbance has long been considered one of the defining features of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), the present study marks only the third empirical investigation to assess it and the first to do so from the perspective of research on narrative identity. Drawing on the rich tradition of studying narrative identity, the present study examined identity disturbance in a group of 40 mid-life adults, 20 with features of BPD and a matched sample of 20 without BPD. Extensive life story interviews were analyzed for a variety of narrative elements and the themes of agency, communion fulfillment (but not communion), …
Mixed Emotional Experience Is Associated With And Precedes Improvements In Psychological Well-Being, Jonathan Adler, Hal Hershfield
Mixed Emotional Experience Is Associated With And Precedes Improvements In Psychological Well-Being, Jonathan Adler, Hal Hershfield
Jonathan M. Adler
Background: The relationships between positive and negative emotional experience and physical and psychological well-being have been well-documented. The present study examines the prospective positive relationship between concurrent positive and negative emotional experience and psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy. Methods: 47 adults undergoing psychotherapy completed measures of psychological well-being and wrote private narratives that were coded by trained raters for emotional content. Results: The specific concurrent experience of happiness and sadness was associated with improvements in psychological well-being above and beyond the impact of the passage of time, personality traits, or the independent effects of happiness and sadness. Changes …
Sitting At The Nexus Of Epistemological Traditions: Narrative Psychological Perspectives On Self-Knowledge, Jonathan Adler
Sitting At The Nexus Of Epistemological Traditions: Narrative Psychological Perspectives On Self-Knowledge, Jonathan Adler
Jonathan M. Adler
To inquire about self knowledge implicitly suggests that there is a self that can be known in a verifiable way. Several psychological disciplines have developed creative and innovative methods for identifying and overcoming barriers to assessing the self in an objective manner. Yet from the perspectives adopted by the growing field of narrative psychology, the very mission of identifying objective self-knowledge is fraught. One of the most exciting elements of the field of narrative psychology is its location at the nexus of two epistemological traditions. On the one hand, narrative psychologists share many of the same concerns with validity, reliability, …