Coherence and Narrative Structure in Personal Accounts of Stressful Experiences

Abstract

Narrative coherence is an important concept in studies of how people come to understand and cope with negative or stressful events in their lives. In three studies we compare two approaches to the measurement of narrative coherence: the percentage of cognitive words and a holistic definition based on criteria indexing the degree to which a story produces an integrated mental representation in its audience. Story-like song lyrics (n = 36) contained fewer cognitive words and more past tense verbs than non-story songs. Personal narratives (n = 35) produced by individuals asked to tell a story had fewer cognitive words compared to narratives written in response to a traditional expressive writing prompt. Compared to narratives about positive experiences, negative accounts contained more cognitive words and these were associated with more words denoting negative emotions (n = 66). We conclude that cognitive words indicate a search for meaning that precedes the development of narrative coherence.

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