Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The self is both stable and ever in motion and it is shaped by a person's telling of storiesto oneself and to others.In fact, the telling of a life story is an act that allows the creation of a stable, yet changing, image of oneself.From this metaphor of people as storytellers (Bruner, 1990;McAdams, 1993;Sarbin, 1986), we have been developing a research program that tracks the emergence of novelties in people's lives, trying to figure out the transformation process of self-narratives (see Gonçalves, Matos & Santos, 2009;Gonçalves, Mendes, Cruz, A. Ribeiro, Angus & Greenberg, 2011).For this purpose we created a coding systemthe Innovative Moment Coding System (Gonçalves, Ribeiro, Mendes, Matos, & Santos, 2011) that allows the tracking of novelties, which emerge in discourse, called innovative moments (or IMs).IMs are exceptions to a dominant selfnarrative.Whereas the dominant self-narrative is the rule (of behaving, feeling, thinking), IMs are the exceptions (like new actions, feelings, thoughts or intentions, for example).According to this model of narrative change (Gonçalves et al., 2009) the expansion of
Institution: University of Minho
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2259891635