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Narrative & Meaning: Relationships Between Autobiographical Reasoning and Memory Reexperiencing in Life Review in Young Adults
Abstract
Despite their many commonalities, there is little empirical research exploring connections between narrative and existential psychology. These experiments aimed to begin to bridge the gap between fields by examining the effects of a narrative life review interview intervention on meaning in life (MIL) in a theoretically interesting but surprisingly understudied population: young adults. Specifically, this study attempted to isolate the mechanism—autobiographical reasoning or memory reexperiencing—that causes the benefits witnessed in life review interventions. To this end, Study 1 employed a three-condition (autobiographical reasoning versus memory reexperiencing versus control) between-participants design with post-intervention quantitative existential outcome measures reported at two time points by 212 participants. The participants had better outcomes in the autobiographical reasoning condition than the memory reexperiencing condition on several existential variables and better indirect outcomes on all variables when mediated by self-as-context. However, there was little differentiation between autobiographical reasoning and the control, and the control led to better psychological results than memory reexperiencing on all outcome measures. To clarify and expand upon the results of Study 1, Study 2 used a two-condition (autobiographical reasoning versus memory reexperiencing) between-participants design with 204 participants but was unable to successfully manipulate the independent variable and found no significant differences between conditions. Nevertheless, exploratory correlational analyses provided some evidence that trait autobiographical reasoning may be more strongly implicated in MIL than memory reexperiencing. Although the overall evidence was ambiguous, this study took a step towards integrating narrative and existential psychology and revealed interesting pathways for future research.
Citation
Guthrie, Devin (2023). Narrative & Meaning: Relationships Between Autobiographical Reasoning and Memory Reexperiencing in Life Review in Young Adults. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /200063.