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88 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
In diaries, as well as in life narratives recorded through interviews, the
main character is the narrator, whose personal identity can be observed in the
narrative (Läszlé, 2008). The need to transmit memories is strong in groups
that have experienced a common trauma or historical turning point. By
using testimonial-type autobiographies, the structure of shared experiences
can be reconstructed.
Different approaches to narratives can be realized in the psychological
analysis of the individual. One type of psychological study focuses on the
role of narratives in dialogues and individual reception. The mainly fictional
narratives (e.g., stories, novels, or films) are important tools for the integration
of life experiences. In psychoanalytic literature, stories frame unconscious
desires. In psychotherapeutic discourse, autobiographical childhood trauma
narratives can appear. The task of the therapist is to establish a dialogue with
the client, the outcome of which is a narrative that is acceptable to the patient
(Läszlé, 1999). Another large group of psychological studies is the primary
investigation of autobiographical narratives. In such studies, the researcher
maps the psychological characteristics of the individual or group through a
content analysis of life stories.
An interdisciplinary approach to content analysis prevails in narrative
psychology research. By adapting the research methods of corpus linguistics,
a new data analysis method for the discipline, named narrative categorical
analysis, has been developed. The basic principle of narrative psychology is
that individuals and groups create their stories based on different principles.
The researcher (or more recently, artificial intelligence software) transcribes
the text into elements to create psychothematic modules, hypermodules, and
relational modules which can be analyzed using mathematical-statistical
methods to match the different psychological categories. Empirical results
obtained in this way can be used to describe and predict the psychological
state of the author(s).
An analysis system for narrative psychology research, the Hungarian¬
developed NarrCat, consists of modules based on dictionaries representing
the general foundations of the Hungarian language, special psychological text
corpora (mostly interviews with people in crisis or with psychiatric pathology),
and various identity narratives (e.g,, national, ethnic, or historical). Text
elements are annotated and assigned to modules by the researchers. The main
modules of the so-called psychothematic modules are agency, evaluation,
emotion and cognition, as well as spatiality and temporality, which can be
further subdivided into other submodules. The emotion module is used to
explore identity constructs and the ways in which trauma is processed. The
evaluation and agency modules provide an accurate picture of intergroup
bias as well as internal and external group relations. The cognition module
measures the extent to which trauma is processed, while the temporality
module explores the subjective experience of time. The spatiality module
helps to map the relationships between social proximity and distancing in