Oldal 89 [89]
OCR
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 Hungariandeveloped 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
