Language Games and Social Cognition: Revisiting Bruner.

This paper discusses the notion of language games as cultural practices in children's early linguistic and socio-cognitive development. First, we trace the emergence of this concept in Jerome Bruner's experimental and theoretical work at Oxford University in the 1960s, work that was informed by the thinking of Wittgenstein and Austin, amongst others. Second, we provide a systematic historical account of how Bruner has influenced more recent research traditions in developmental psychology, especially in the field of social cognition. Finally, we hone in on one specific approach within this field developed by the Laboratory for Developmental and Educational Studies in Psychology at the University of Milano Bicocca.

Memory, Narrative, and the Consequences.

Drawing on papers from three different areas - evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, sociolinguistics analysis - this commentary states that there is by now an empirically grounded and theoretically reflected memory research that has begun to break with the traditional individual-centric orientation of the memory sciences. This break, it is argued, is the consequence of a new interest in the dialectics between memory and language, between social (or collective or collaborative) remembering and narrative. On this view, memory is taken less as a substance and more as a set of practices, of intersubjective and interpretive acts of a remembering subject.

Men, fire, and burns: Stories of fighting, healing, and emotions.

Burn recovery is a difficult process full of physical and psychological challenges. With increasing survival rates, there has been renewed interest in the psychological aspects of burn recovery. As men represent over 70% of all burn patients, it is particularly important to study how men experience and interpret this process. We interviewed a purposeful sample of ten adult male burn survivors from different age and cultural groups in the first 16 weeks of their recovery and asked them to discuss the problems they faced. Narrative analysis was used to interpret the interviews. In their narratives, the men tended to emphasize gains in their physical recovery; that is, they often used metaphors of "fighting" to demonstrate how committed they were to their healing. Further, they put less emphasis on the emotional aspects of their recovery. In our discussion, we compare these complex storylines to coping strategies identified in the literature and discuss why men may choose these strategies. Based on our findings we argue that it is important for health care providers to be aware of societal pressures which may influence burn survivors to minimize affective elements of burn recovery. Additionally, we encourage exploring and capitalizing on men's "fighting" stories during rehabilitation in order to foster an active role which men can take in their recovery.

Enhancing social cognition by training children in emotion understanding: a primary school study.

We investigated whether training school-age children in emotion understanding had a significant effect on their social cognition. Participants were 110 children (mean age=7 years 3 months) assigned to training and control conditions. Over a 2-month intervention program, after the reading of illustrated scenarios based on emotional scripts, the training group was engaged in conversations on emotion understanding, whereas the control group was simply asked to produce a drawing about the story. The training group outperformed the control group on emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, and the positive training outcomes for emotion understanding remained stable over 6 months. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Broken heart stories: understanding Aboriginal women's cardiac problems.

Many Aboriginal communities call heart problems, and in particular cardiovascular disease, "White man's sickness." At the same time, Aboriginal women present with some of the highest rates of this disease. Against this backdrop, we explored how women with cardiac problems understand their heart health and used narrative-discursive methods to analyze interviews conducted with women from two First Nations in North America. The women told stories that were riddled with contradictions, unfolding a complicated personal and cultural reality of living with cardiovascular disease. In many stories, heart disease was described as resulting from a "community imbalance" in the wake of colonialism whereby the women had to take over the traditional roles of men. Their ideas of heart disease risk and healing flowed from this understanding. They derived a sense of strength, however, from their ability to undertake both gender roles. Based on our findings, we provide some recommendations for cardiac care.

"Put on your face to face the world": women's narratives of burn injury.

The survival rate of individuals with burn injury has significantly increased due to medical advances in burn care. This has led to a need to focus on psychological aspects of burn injury recovery, particularly on how people come to terms with their changed bodies. The literature suggests that burn size and severity are not directly associated with the degree of distress but that subjective perceptions and interpretations - of, for instance, body image - are pertinent. Body image appears to be particularly important for women and thus, in this study, we investigated women's experiences of their bodies following mild to moderate burns. We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 female burn survivors in the first year after injury, using methods of narrative analysis for the investigations of the transcripts. Thirteen consecutive women who met inclusion criterion were approached at regional burn care follow-up clinic. In their narratives, the women predominantly emphasized how well they were doing; however, counter-narratives emerged indicating dissatisfaction and distress. The tension between these two different kinds of narratives suggests an ambivalent relationship with the burn injury. We concluded that it is imperative for health care professionals to be cognizant of these conflicting experiences in order to adequately address burn survivors' needs in rehabilitation.

Heart stories: men and women after a cardiac incident.

In this study we explore the views and beliefs of men and women about cardiovascular disease and the emotions and social relations that are involved. Women and men attending a cardiovascular rehabilitation program participated in two in-depth interviews carried out with each individual six months after a first serious cardiac event. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using a narrative-discursive methodology. Although there were numerous differences between the men and women's stories, an outstanding commonality was that their narrative efforts to negotiate healing and rehabilitation were guided by gendered identities and societal roles.

Continuity amid chaos: neurotrauma, loss of memory, and sense of self.

In serious illness or disability, individuals commonly say that their sense of self has dramatically changed. One might expect that the experience of a radically altered sense of self would be even more profound in individuals after neurotrauma because it is the brain itself that suddenly, and often literally, becomes "strange." The aim of this study was to investigate how people left with autobiographical memory impairments--impairments that also affect the capacity to organize complex linguistic productions such as autobiographical narratives--experience themselves and, specifically, their sense of self. Seven adults who had primarily anterograde memory impairments for 1 year were interviewed. Regardless of the profound changes in their everyday functioning and lives, the stories the participants told evoke a surprising sense of a continuous self. Employing several narrative and discursive techniques, they emphasized sameness and an unbroken connection between their pre- and post-morbid lives. We believe that most individuals felt they did not have to recover their former sense of self because they subjectively seemed to have never lost it.

Making sense of traumatic experiences: telling your life with fragile X syndrome.

The discourse of individuals with fragile X syndrome has been described as fragmented, tangential, and associatively connected, resulting in autobiographical narratives that are incoherent and difficult to understand. In this article, the authors discuss the case of an adolescent female with moderate mental retardation due to fragile X syndrome. The analysis of her autobiographical stories, rather than being primarily reflective of cognitive impoverishment, reveals a different--narrative--mode of thought. The authors present and examine some of her narratives in terms of their specific functions: communication, coherence, exploration, distancing, and evaluation. Their findings suggest that narrative analysis can be an important complement to traditional neuropsychological assessment.

Narrativa: problemas e promessas de um paradigma alternativo / Narrative: problems and promises of an alternative paradigm

O aumento de interesse no estudo da narrativa e seu contexto social sugere a emergência de outro caminho ao paradigma pós-positivista e um melhor refinamento da metodologia interpretativa nas ciências humanas. O problema do entendimento dos padrões dinâmicos do comportamento humano parece estar mais próximo de uma solução através dos estudos da narrativa do que até mesmo de abordagens bem conhecidas, como a utilização do modelo de regras e papéis. Nesse artigo, abordaremos algumas das qualidades que fizeram do estudo da narrativa uma abordagem produtiva. Procuramos definir a noção de narrativa e diferenciá-la de outros padrões de discurso, tendo como base estudos sócio-psicolingüísticos, filosóficos e literários. Procuramos também identificar algumas dificuldades teóricas e possíveis riscos dos quais os estudiosos da narrativa deveriam estar conscientes. Finalmente, esboçamos uma compreensão da narrativa que objetiva levar em conta sua condição particular de um discurso contextualizado e seu caráter aberto e transitório (AU)

Narrativa: problemas e promessas de um paradigma alternativo / Narrative: problems and promises of an alternative paradigm

O aumento de interesse no estudo da narrativa e seu contexto social sugere a emergência de outro caminho ao paradigma pós-positivista e um melhor refinamento da metodologia interpretativa nas ciências humanas. O problema do entendimento dos padrões dinâmicos do comportamento humano parece estar mais próximo de uma solução através dos estudos da narrativa do que até mesmo de abordagens bem conhecidas, como a utilização do modelo de regras e papéis. Nesse artigo, abordaremos algumas das qualidades que fizeram do estudo da narrativa uma abordagem produtiva. Procuramos definir a noção de narrativa e diferenciá-la de outros padrões de discurso, tendo como base estudos sócio-psicolingüísticos, filosóficos e literários. Procuramos também identificar algumas dificuldades teóricas e possíveis riscos dos quais os estudiosos da narrativa deveriam estar conscientes. Finalmente, esboçamos uma compreensão da narrativa que objetiva levar em conta sua condição particular de um discurso contextualizado e seu caráter aberto e transitório.