coherence and narrative structure in personal ...

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2010, pp. 256-280

Coherence and Narrative Structure KLEIN AND BOALS

Coherence and Narrative Structure in Personal Accounts of Stressful Experiences Kitty Klein North Carolina State University Adriel Boals University of North Texas

Narrative coherence is an important concept in studies of how people come to understand and cope with negative or stressful events in their lives. In three studies we compare two approaches to the measurement of narrative coherence: the percentage of cognitive words and a holistic definition based on criteria indexing the degree to which a story produces an integrated mental representation in its audience. Story-like song lyrics (n = 36) contained fewer cognitive words and more past tense verbs than non-story songs. Personal narratives (n = 35) produced by individuals asked to tell a story had fewer cognitive words compared to narratives written in response to a traditional expressive writing prompt. Compared to narratives about positive experiences, negative accounts contained more cognitive words and these were associated with more words denoting negative emotions (n = 66). We conclude that cognitive words indicate a search for meaning that precedes the development of narrative coherence.

During the past 25 years, the construct narrative coherence has assumed a prominent role in a variety of theories guiding psychological research and practice. Areas as diverse as narrative therapy, expressive writing, life-span developmental psychology and self-deCorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Adriel Boals, University of North Texas, Department of Psychology, Box 311280, Denton, TX 76208. E-mail: [email protected].

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velopment theory all utilize narrative coherence of autobiographical accounts as a key concept. For example, greater coherence in describing a traumatic event is believed to lead to better response to treatment (Salvatore et al., 2006) and to improved psychological and physical health (Pennebaker, 2000). Narrative coherence presumably increases with age (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) and is associated with identity stability (Pasupathi, 2001). Despite the widespread use of the concept, narrative coherence enjoys varying definitions even within a discipline (Dimaggio, 2006). In this paper, we define narrative coherence as the degree to which a story produces an integrated mental representation in its audience, whether that audience is the self or another listener or reader. Coherence involves connections that result from interactions of the text and the reader’s experience, abilities and goals (McNamara, 2001). McAdams (2006) identifies two primary sets of norms that affect the level of coherence: structure and content. Texts that do not meet shared structural expectations about stories having beginning, middles, and endings, characters with intentions and goals, causal explanations, or plot resolution are less coherent than stories that follow these norms. Equally important to coherence is that author and audience share a view of how the world works and what people typically do under the circumstances detailed in the story. Although these two sets of norms could apply to any account, including a fictional narrative, Habermas and Bluck (2000) developed criteria specifically for autobiographical narratives. In their taxonomy, global or overall coherence is determined by the extent to which there is temporal, causal, and thematic coherence and by the author’s ability to establish autobiographical coherence. Thematic coherence evolves from the ability to see a general theme underlying discrete events and behaviors. Autobiographical coherence refers to knowledge of how others’ lives typically proceed. Despite concerns regarding the absence of consistent conceptual definitions of the narrative coherence, even less attention has been devoted to developing operational definitions of coherence that will foster empirical work. The present paper reports three experiments designed to compare a computerized coherence scoring system (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) and a holistic rating system devised specifically for autobiographical narratives.

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Study 1 McAdams (2006) has argued that good stories need to be coherent. The first experiment applies a widely used method for assessing coherence in autobiographical narratives, Pennebaker, Francis, and Booth’s (2001) Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program, to popular song lyrics that do or do not tell a story. LIWC recognizes over 2,000 words and classifies them into 74 predetermined categories, although researchers can add additional categories if desired. The categories can be grammatical (e.g., pronouns) or content-based, for example, words denoting negative emotions. The category Cognitive Mechanisms includes insight-related words such as understand and realize and causal words such as reason and because. For example, someone may say, “I now realize that the reason women keep breaking up with me is because I am too selfcentered.” Pennebaker and Francis (1996) have argued that the use of these cognitive words indicates the extent to which the writer has achieved a coherent narrative. By this definition, more coherent stories contain greater percentages of such words presumably because the use of more causal words promotes causal coherence that is one of the defining features of global coherence. Arguments can be made for a dissociation between cognitive words and coherence, however, and the available empirical evidence does suggest that better stories do not necessarily contain more cognitive words. Although preschoolers incorporate cognitive words in their first stories (Shapiro & Hudson, 1991), they do not fully understand causal relationships until the age of eight (Peterson & McCabe, 1985) and their ability to achieve causal coherence does not develop fully until adolescence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000). Working with college student participants, Graybeal, Sexton, and Pennebaker (2002) defined a good story as a writing sample with a clear beginning, middle, and end. They compared judges’ ratings on these criteria with LIWC counts of causal, insight-related, positive emotion, and negative emotion words for three brief essays. Each student participant provided an explanation of a drawing of two figures, an account of a personal extremely emotional experience and an account on a control topic, time management. The only significant correlations between judges’ ratings and the word counts were for the picture description essays in which writing samples


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rated as better stories were associated with fewer positive and negative emotion words. Surprisingly, use of cognitive words, the category believed to exemplify story development, was unrelated to story ratings. In fact, of 12 additional LIWC dimensions selected for further analyses, only word count was related to the story ratings for the emotional experience topic. In the present experiment we examine the cognitive word count in texts that do or do not tell a story. In searching for a corpus of literature describing personal emotional experiences that could be distinguished as clearly telling a story and clearly not, we settled on popular song lyrics. Most listeners would agree that some song lyrics tell a story (a clear beginning, middle, and end, etc.) whereas others do not have a story structure. Our question was to what extent lyrics that tell a story differ in the percentage of cognitive words from lyrics that do not tell a story. To the extent that good stories are coherent, more story-like lyrics should contain higher percentages of cognitive words; the Graybeal et al. (2002) findings suggest that there may be no difference in use of cognitive words between story-like and non-story-like songs. Method Selection of Songs. The authors canvassed students, colleagues, and acquaintances to identify an initial set of story songs. In the request for nominations, story songs were described as ones that had at least one central character and described an event or set of events that the character(s) experienced. To control for possible idiosyncratic individual differences in word use that might contribute to differences in story and non-story lyrics, we examined the initial list to see if the songwriter/lyricist had also produced a non-story song. Eighteen of the nominated story songs were written by songwriters who had also written a non-story song, giving us a total sample of 36 songs. For example, the Beatles “She’s Leaving Home” tells a story about a daughter leaving her parents while their “Come Together” has prompted thousands of internet speculations on the song’s meaning. The complete list of the writers, performers, and songs is available from the second author. Procedure. A convenience sample of five judges who had not participated in nominating the song for inclusion in the study and who were not aware of the hypothesis independently coded each

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song as Story-Like or Non-Story Like using Graybeal et al.’s criteria of whether or not the song had a clear beginning, middle, or end. Judges were provided with the lyrics of the songs being coded. The lyrics of the songs were analyzed using the LIWC computer program (Pennebaker et al., 2001). To avoid capitalizing on the redundancy of multiple choruses, only a single chorus for each song was included. Results Reliability of the Story/Non-Story Distinction. There was perfect agreement between judges on 23 sets of the lyrics. On 12 sets, a single judgment differed from the other four and the song was categorized according to the majority opinion. For one lyric, Paul Simon’s “You can call me Al,” two judges rated it as Story Like; three rated it as Non-Story Like. Based on these ratings, both the songs written by Paul Simon were removed prior to analysis. Including the Paul Simon songs in a second analysis of the data produced the same differences as those reported below. Linguistic Analysis. Of particular interest was the percentage of cognitive words, and two subcategories of cognitive words, cause, and insight categories. Following Graybeal et al. (2002), we also report other LIWC dimensions that indicated significant or nearsignificant differences between the songs. As shown in Table 1, repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that story songs contained a lower percentage of cognitive words, cause words, and a trend toward a lower percentage of insight words. Further analyses indicated that story lyrics were longer than nonstory lyrics, and contained a smaller percentage of words related to affective processes, particularly positive emotions. Non-story lyrics contained more words related to sensory feeling, e.g., “touch,” “hold.” There were differences in verb tense as well. Story songs contained lower percentages of present and future tense verbs but higher percentages of past tense verbs. Discussion Contrary to the notion that greater coherence is associated with more cognitive words, story-like song lyrics contained a lower


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TABLE 1. Mean Percentage of Words in Story and Non-Story Song Lyrics for Predicted (Cognitive Words) and Other LIWC Categories of Interest

Story Songs

Non-Story Songs

Standard Deviation of the Difference

Cohen’s d1

366.1

229.1

199.2

0.69

You**

2.4

5.4

4.3

0.69

Other*

5.8

2.5

4.1

0.81

Article**

8.5

6.3

3.2

0.71

Affective*

4.3

6.5

4.0

0.57

Positive emotions

2.4

3.9

2.8

0.56

Cognitive*

5.1

7.4

3.9

0.60

Cause***

.4

1.0

0.6

0.83

Insight

1.7

2.3

1.3

0.41

Feel (sensory) *

0.2

0.8

1.1

0.57

Past tense***

6.6

3.0

2.8

1.31

Present tense***

9.7

15.0

3.6

1.44

Future tense*

0.8

1.5

1.3

0.50

Characteristic Word count*

Cohen’s d calculated by dividing absolute value of mean difference by the standard deviation of the differences. *p ≤ .05; **p ≤ .01; ***p ≤ .001.

1

percentage of cognitive words than did the non-story song lyrics. Nonstory songs contained more than twice the percentage of cause words as did story songs. There were also differences on other dimensions, notably word counts, emotional processes, positive emotions, and verb tense. The fewer references to emotions and the longer word count findings were congruent with Graybeal et al. (2002) who found that judges rated longer essays and essays with fewer emotion words as more story-like. Differences in verb tense were not surprising; story songs used more past tense and fewer present or future tense verbs. An important issue to consider when considering the results of the current study is that most of the data regarding the use of cognitive words comes from college student authors participating in psychology experiments, who may have very different goals and expertise than professional song lyricists. In contrast to students’ accounts, texts of commercially popular songs are written and rewritten to coordinate with their musical settings and appeal to their listeners (Lewis, 1976). A second problem with interpreting the data as showing that nonstory songs employ fewer causal words, is the possibility that the

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story and non-story lyrics differ in other ways. Although judges did agree with the initial categorization of songs as story or non-story, there may be musical or poetic constraints that limit our findings to the song-lyric domain. Highly story-like lyrics are more characteristic of certain musical genres, such as ballads or country songs, and thus our story/non-story distinction may also represent a genre distinction. The nature and size of the sample of lyrics selected may also have been problematic. Given that the mean percentage of causal words is less than one percent, including a different pair of songs, or more songs, might seriously impact differences in the presence/absence of causal words. In our culture, readers are well aware of narrative conventions. For instance, there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, and these conventions are used to process text (Gergen, 1994). These narrative conventions provide a scaffold for story construction. One interpretation of our data is that good stories can be related as such without resorting to abundant usage of causal words. When there is no clear story line, the author attempts to make connections explicit through the inclusion of specific words denoting the connection. Whether our finding of an inverse relationship between story presence and cognitive words in song lyrics will replicate when individuals are asked to write about their personal experiences led us to our next experiment.

Study 2 In the second experiment we examined the use of cognitive words in the narrative genre in which most of such research has been conducted: essays from the expressive writing procedure. We manipulated the instructions to determine whether an explicit prompt to construct a story about a stressful experience would affect the incidence of cognitive words and narrative coherence more traditionally defined. In addition to the LIWC system used in the first study, we employed a holistic system specifically developed to assess narrative coherence in autobiographical accounts obtained in written emotional disclosure experiments (Katz, 1999). The measure is based on classic views of first person narratives (Baumeister & Newman, 1994; Becker, 1999; Labov & Waletzky, 1967). As outlined in the methods section, Katz’s measure identifies seven conventions that must be present for an essay to be judged as high in coherence.


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Texts receive scores from 1 (incoherent) to 5 (exceptionally coherent) based on how well they meet these criteria. The criteria and training materials are similar to those used by the Educational Testing Service to train judges to evaluate writing samples for coherence. To examine the relationship between the lexical and holistic measures of coherence we contrasted essays produced in response to traditional expressive writing instructions and in response to instructions to construct a story. Although there have been a number of investigations of the prompts provided in structured writing experiments (e.g., Gidron et al., 2002; Páez, Velasco, & González, 1999; Sloan, Marx, & Epstein, 2005; Smyth, True, & Souto, 2001), the majority of these have entailed variations on the topic to be discussed. Analysis in these studies has rarely included the percentage of cognitive words produced under different prompts. In an experiment most relevant to ours, Smyth et al. (2001) found that expressive writing essays for which participants were given instructions to form a narrative did receive higher ratings for narrative structure than essays generated in response to instructions to list thoughts, feelings, and sensations about a traumatic experience. The percentage of cognitive words in the essays was not reported. In one experiment that did examine the linguistic features of essays, King and Miner (2000) asked participants either to write about a traumatic experience, the perceived benefits of a traumatic experience, or a traumatic experience and its perceived benefits. Compared to the other groups, including a control group that wrote about mundane topics, participants who wrote about perceived benefits only used a greater percentage of cognitive words. This study is particularly interesting because participants may have had difficulty following the instructions to focus only on the positive aspects of the trauma. Lacking a coherent narrative under these conditions, they may have turned to cognitive words. Our hypothesis for the present study is that writers given the standard instructions to write about their “very deepest thoughts and feelings” about the stressful event would employ more cognitive words and fewer past tense words, in comparison to writers instructed to use a story format to write about these thoughts and feelings. We also predicted that writers asked to use a story format would receive higher ratings of holistic coherence. The rationale for these predictions is that the standard writing prompts encourage participants to “let themselves go,” suggesting that narrative conventions may be safely ignored and increasing the need for cog-

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nitive words to provide explanations for actions and emotions. In contrast, instructions to tell a story in an organized format should encourage the application of these conventions, reducing the dependence on cognitive words to lend meaning to the account. Method Participants. Forty participants (23 female) volunteered in exchange for partial course credit. Half the participants were randomly assigned to a traditional instruction condition and the other half to a condition in which the instructions emphasized that their writing should tell a story. Self-Report Questionnaire. After the final writing session, a manipulation check asked participants to describe in their own words the instructions they had received in regard to how their essays should be written. They then completed a nine-item questionnaire, all using a 7-point response scale ranging from not-at-all (1) to a great deal (7). Three questions were designed to test the equivalency of the two experimental groups: (1) how much they had previously thought about the topic; (2) how much they had talked with others about it; and (3) the degree to which the topic was upsetting. Five items addressed participants’ reactions to their writing assignment (1) how upsetting it was to write about it; (2) the extent to which they had revealed emotions; (3) the extent to which they had revealed personal information; (4) whether the experiment had led to their talking with other people about the topic; and (5) the extent to which they benefited from the experiment. A final question asked how well structured they thought their essays were. Linguistic Analysis. As in the first experiment, LIWC was used to assess the percentage of cognitive and past tense words employed in the essays. Holistic Analysis. Two judges, blind to condition and working independently, coded each essay for its degree of holistic coherence using Katz’s (1999) system. This holistic scoring system outlines seven criteria for highly coherent narratives. The criteria are: • a character (usually “I,” may have other characters as well) who maintains a stable identity • a scene (location, e.g., college, here) and time (e.g., now, today, this week)


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• a beginning (which sets out a goal for the character(s) and creates expectations for the reader) • a middle (which describes events that affect the goal) • an end (which lets the reader know whether or not the goal was achieved) • the essay forecasts what is to follow (creates expectations about what the essay will include) • the essay fulfills the expectations created Procedure. Participants reported individually for each session of the experiment. At the first experimental session, everyone received a large envelope containing their writing instructions and a floppy disk. The instructions first requested that all participants write a brief description of a stressful experience that had had a very negative effect on their lives, ideally one that was unresolved or still bothering the participant. Individuals assigned to the traditional structured writing condition then read the following instructions, based on those developed by Pennebaker, Colder, and Sharp (1990): In the next sessions of this experiment, your task is to write for 20 minutes about your very deepest thoughts and feelings regarding the event you just described that had such a negative impact on your life. In your writing, try to let yourself go and write continuously about your emotions and thoughts related to these events. Describe the facts and feelings of your experiences. Write about the experience in as much detail as you can. Do your best to “tie it all together” at the end of the writing. You do not have to save what you have entered once you have finished, but it would benefit our study greatly if you would. The important thing is that you really let yourself go and dig down to your very deepest thoughts and feelings about the negative event.

For individuals randomly assigned to the story instruction conditions we prepared the following instructions: In the next sessions of this experiment, your task is to write for 20 minutes about your very deepest thoughts and feelings regarding the event you just described that had such a negative impact on your life. In your writing, try to use a “story-like” format to convey your thoughts. In doing so, your “story” should have a clear beginning (which sets the stage for what is to follow), middle (which explains the events and your interpretation as to why they occurred), and an ending (which will describe the outcome of the event and will “tie it

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all together”). Feel free to elaborate at any point in your narrative, but be sure to stay focused on the topic previously stated. You do not have to save what you have entered once you have finished, but it would benefit our study greatly if you would. Just remember, try to dig down to your deepest thoughts and feelings and keep in mind that the most important thing is that you attempt to organize these thoughts into a “story-like” format.

All participants were asked to type their essays on a computer and save the files to the floppy disk. They were told that they would receive full credit for the experiment even if they chose not to save their files; all participants did save their files. The experimenter was unaware of participant condition. Participants wrote three times, roughly four days apart, over a two-week period. At each session, they received the same envelope containing instructions and the floppy disk from their previous session. Following the third session, they completed the questionnaire. In the present experiment, we report analyses of the first essay only and responses to the final questionnaire. Results An independent observer, blind to the study’s hypotheses but not to the instructions, successfully classified 35 of the 37 participants into the traditional or the story creation condition. Two women’s responses to the manipulation check question indicated they had not understood or followed the instructions they had received. Three men did not complete all experimental sessions and were missing responses to the final questionnaire. An additional participant’s final questionnaire was misplaced so her data was not available for analysis of questionnaire responses. Data from the first essay were analyzed with and without these individuals. Of the data retained for the initial analyses, eighteen participants (10 women) received the traditional structured writing prompt; 17 (11 women) received the story construction prompt. Holistic Analysis. After studying the training manual that includes practice essays, the judges practiced on a set of 60 essays from a different structured writing experiment. Following training and the practice essays, they worked independently on the first set of es-


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says produced in this experiment. The judges were blinded to the experimental condition of the essay author. The raters differed by two or more points on two of the essays. The judges discussed these discrepancies, and on the essay on which they could not agree, a third judge, unaware of the original ratings, made the final determination. We computed intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) for consistency and absolute agreement. The former indexes the extent to which judges’ ratings covary across the essays. The latter assesses the extent to which judges assign the same values to the set of essays. The ICCs for both consistency and agreement were .75. Percentage of Cognitive Mechanism Words and Holistic Coherence. We used independent groups t-tests to examine differences in the characteristics of interest. These means are shown in Table 2. Our first prediction, that participants instructed to create a story should use fewer cognitive words compared to participants given the standard structured writing prompt, was confirmed. Participants who received standard structured writing instructions used more cognitive words than participants asked to create a story. A similar analysis performed on the holistic scores revealed that participants asked to construct a story about their stressful experiences received higher holistic coherence ratings on their essays than did participants given standard structured writing instructions. Finally, participants who received the story prompt wrote longer essays and used more past tense verbs compared to participants who were assigned to the standard structured writing instructions. We also ran these analyses including the three participants who did not complete the final questionnaire and the two individuals who failed the manipulation check. The only difference in results was that the significance of the t-test for coherence scores was reduced to p < .06. Analysis of Questionnaire Items. Independent groups t-tests revealed no differences on any of the nine questionnaire items as a function of the writing prompt to which participants had been assigned. We also examined the correlations between participants’ responses to the question about how well structured their essays were and use of cognitive words and Katz holistic coherence ratings. The correlation between the holistic coherence ratings and participants’ structure ratings, r(32) = .30, p < .06, was the only one to approach significance.

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KLEIN AND BOALS TABLE 2. Means of Essay Characteristics as a Function of Instructions

Characteristic

Standard Prompta

Word Count*

Story Promptb

Cohen’s d1

427.4

(37.6)

560.2

(40.2)

.84

Cognitive *

9.3

( 0.6)

7.7

( 0.4)

.88

Past Tense*

6.7

( 0.5)

8.5

( 0.5)

.80

Katz coherence score*

2.8

( 0.2)

3.5

( 0.2)

.79

Note. Standard errors are in parentheses. Cohen’s d calculated by dividing absolute value of difference between the means by the pooled standard deviation. an = 18; bn = 17. *p ≤ .05. 1

Discussion The purpose of this experiment was to investigate whether manipulating the structured writing prompt would produce differences in the percentage of cognitive words and Katz holistic coherence scores. As predicted, the standard prompt, which asks participants to write about their “very deepest thoughts and feelings” about a stressful event, resulted in more cognitive words and lower ratings of coherence than the prompt to use a story format. Furthermore, differences in the use of the past tense and the total number of words corroborate similar findings from Experiment 1. Participants’ selfreports did not differ as a function of the instructions, but there was a trend for participants who wrote essays with higher holistic scores to report better structure. These data further bolster our suggestion that the presence of high percentages of cognitive words does not constitute a more coherent narrative and indeed, may indicate a less coherent narrative in which causal connectors are required to provide links for both the author and the reader. We took precautions to avoid confounding variables. The same woman experimenter who ran all participants was blinded to experimental condition. Participants did not receive the writing instructions until after they had nominated the experience, making it unlikely that those who received the story composition instructions selected experiences for which they already had a coherent story. As part of the informed consent, participants were assured that they could not be linked to what they wrote. One limitation on the external validity of the experiment was our asking participants to type their essays onto a computer disk. Brewin and Lennard (1999) found that compared to students who wrote in long hand, people who typed narratives of a stressful ex-


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perience reported less negative affect and less emotional disclosure, presumably because the additional mental resources needed for typing interfere with the activation of nonconscious emotions. Whether our results would be similar had we asked participants to write their essays is an interesting question. Among the questions the present study does not answer is why the standard expressive writing prompt produces such high numbers of cognitive words. To address this and other issues, we conducted a third experiment.

Study 3 The results of the first two studies suggest that low levels of cognitive word use can accompany high levels of narrative coherence. The third study examines cognitive word use and Katz holistic coherence ratings in personal accounts of negative and positive experiences. The data come from the first session of an expressive writing experiment reported elsewhere (Klein & Boals, 2001). Our primary hypothesis is that people recounting negative experiences should employ more cognitive words and show less narrative coherence compared to people writing about positive events. There is evidence that percentages of cognitive words generally increase when a writer is describing a stressful experience. For example, Boals and Klein (2005) found that college students use an elevated percentage of cognitive words when describing the stressful aspects of a recent romantic breakup, in comparison to the less stressful aspects. Boals and Perez (2009) found that Holocaust survivors use more cognitive words when describing their Holocaust experiences, in comparison to describing other aspects of their lives. In an analysis of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s speeches, Giuliani used a higher percentage of cognitive words when he was going through a period of personal crisis (Pennebaker & Lay, 2002). In contrast, the percentage of cause and insight related words averaged across three writing samples in Klein & Boals’ (2001) study did not differ significantly between positive and negative topic essays when compared to the control topic essays. There are at least two explanations for why people use more cognitive words when describing stressful experiences. Pennebaker, Mayne, and Francis (1997) believe that higher levels of cognitive words reflect the cognitive processes associated with encoding and storing features of the experience “in a more organized, coherent,

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and simplified manner . . . that reduces the associated emotional arousal ” (p. 864). According to this view, personal accounts that contain higher percentages of cognitive words will have a lower percentage of words denoting negative emotions. A second possibility for the high levels of cognitive words observed in accounts of trauma is that they promote understanding when coherence is low. Increased cognitive word use in the wake of a stressful experience may indicate that individuals are going through the active process of trying to answer the question of why this event or tragedy occurred, organizing their thoughts about the experience, updating schemas, and coming to an understanding of the causal connections. Petrie, Booth, and Pennebaker’s (1998) findings that not thinking about a negative experience resulted in subsequent increases in the use of cognitive words to describe the experience lend empirical support to the idea that using cognitive words reflects initial attempts to come to understand upsetting experiences. In a study of online diaries focused on the September 11 terrorist attacks (Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2004), use of cognitive words increased significantly on September 11, continued to increase in the subsequent 3-4 days, then returned to baseline levels approximately one week later. It is possible that the increased use of cognitive words in the days following the attacks reflect people going through the process of a search-for-meaning necessary for the development of a coherent narrative structure, which once reached, allowed them to dispense with many of the cognitive word links used in its development. Accordingly, more cognitive words may accompany more negative emotions but greater narrative coherence should be associated with fewer negative emotion words. Turning to the effects of the topic of an autobiographical account, Rubin and Berntsen (2003) have argued that in contrast to negative events, positive experiences are typically better scripted. Scripts are sequences of events that are typically stereotypic, with each event setting the stage for the following event (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Well-scripted experiences make an active search-for-meaning process less likely because shared cultural expectations about events like winning a sporting contest, weddings, and vacations lend these narratives to being readily understood. To the extent that positive events themselves have a more coherent structure, stories about them should require fewer causal explanations. In regard to differences in holistic coherence in descriptions of positive and negative experiences, Porter and Birt (2001) found no


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differences in subjective ratings of coherence for descriptions of positive memories and for trauma memories of varying severity. In children’s narratives (Fivush, Hazzard, Sales, Sarfati, & Brown, 2003), coherence ratings were higher for descriptions of negative, compared to positive experiences, a result the authors attribute to their belief that in the world, negative events are more coherently organized than positive events. In contrast to this view, there is considerable theory and data that stressful experiences are by their very nature incoherent (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Tait & Silver, 1989), leading to the prediction that descriptions of stressful negative experiences should be less coherent than descriptions of positive experiences. Again, as in the first two studies, we explored whether the Katz coherence ratings and use of cognitive words are related to use of the past tense. Past tense, called the narrative frame, is considered a hallmark of stories that distinguish them from other kinds of narrative, such as descriptions (Stenning & Michell, 1985). In the present study, we further compare the relationship between the coherence ratings from the two coding systems and the use of past tense verbs. To summarize, the present study addresses three questions regarding writing about positive and negative personal events: first whether the measures of coherence are sensitive to the topic of the disclosure; second, the relationship of negative emotion words to cognitive word use and holistic coherence; and third, the relationship of the past tense to the coherence ratings produced by the different coding systems. Method In this study, we utilize data from 66 participants in Klein and Boals’ (2001) second experiment who wrote three times about a major life event that had had a negative or positive impact on their lives. Participants assigned to the control group were not included, as these individuals were specifically instructed to produce a list of their recent activities or future activities and not to mention any emotions. Participants. The first essay from 32 (20 female) participants who had been randomly assigned to write about a positive experience and 34 (20 female) participants who had been assigned to write about a negative experience were used.

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Procedure. At the beginning of the spring semester, participants wrote about either a self-nominated personal positive or personal negative experience. The instructions emphasized that writers should try to tie together their thoughts and emotions about the assigned event. Linguistic Analysis. The essays were analyzed using the LIWC program (Pennebaker et al., 2001) to count the percentages of negative and positive emotion words, cognitive words, and past tense verbs. Holistic Analysis. Two trained judges, unaware of experimental condition, who had not judged the essays produced in Experiment 2, independently coded the first and the third essays using Katz’s holistic system described in Experiment 2. Results The first analyses concerned the reliability between the two judges’ estimates for the holistic criteria. The ICCs were of acceptable magnitude for consistency (.78) and for agreement (.78). To determine whether essay topic influenced scores on the coding systems we conducted univariate ANOVAs on the percentage of cognitive words and on the holistic coherence scores. Writers about negative experiences employed more cognitive words M = 8.4 compared to writers about positive experiences M = 7.0, F(1, 64) =7.85, p < .007, η2 = .108. Including the percentage of negative emotion words as a covariate F(1, 63) =11.00, p < .002, η2 = .15 reduced the effect of topic to nonsignificance, F(1, 63) = .514. Similar analyses examining levels of narrative coherence in positive and negative topic essays produced no significant difference, F(1, 64) = .751. In the ANCOVA, the percentage of negative emotion words was significant, F(1, 63) = 4.23, p < .04, η2 = .06. Our next analyses addressed the question of the relationship between the use of cognitive words and negative emotions. Overall, there was a moderate correlation r(64) = .49, p < .0001 indicating that higher levels of cognitive word use were associated with the presence of more negative emotion words. Cognitive words and positive emotion words were unrelated. A similar analyses using the narrative coherence scores indicated that greater narrative coher-


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ence was related to lower percentages of both negative r(64) = -.26, p < .04 and positive emotion words r(64) = -.29, p < .02. For the negative topic essays, the greater the use of cognitive words, the greater the use of negative emotion words, r(32) = .42, p < .02. The narrative coherence of these essays was unrelated to the incidence of either negative or positive emotion words, both rs = -.29, p < .10. For the positive topic essays, the use of cognitive words was not related to the level of negative r(30) = .30 or positive r(30) =.35 emotion words, both ps < .10. Higher holistic coherence scores were associated with fewer positive emotion words r(30) = -.39, p < .03 but unrelated to the use of negative emotion words, r(30) = -.24. As in the previous experiments, the percentage of cognitive words was negatively related to holistic coherence overall, r(64) = -.37, p < .002 and for both the positive, r(30) = -.40, p < .02 and negative topics, r(32) = -.33, p < .05. Finally, there was no relationship between the use of the past tense and the use of cognitive words in either the negative or positive topic essays, rs = .23 and .20, respectively, both n.s. In contrast, there was a relationship between the use of the past tense and the essays’ scores on the holistic measure for both negative and positive topic essays, rs = .38, and .53, respectively, both ps < .002. Discussion In the third experiment we applied a lexical analysis of cognitive words (Pennebaker et al., 2001), and a holistic narrative coherence scoring system (Katz, 1999) to accounts of personal experiences produced in a written disclosure experiment. As predicted, we found effects of essay topic on the level of cognitive words. Authors describing negative events used a greater percentage of cognitive words than did authors describing positive events. The cognitive word category contains many causal connector words and in descriptions of stressful experiences, causal connectors can help provide links between events and emotions that allow an individual to come to a better understanding of the experience. A defining feature of stressful experiences is their violation of expectations (JanoffBulman, 1992). In our view, high levels of cognitive word use are needed to infuse meaning into unpredictable and chaotic events. On the other hand, pleasant experiences, such as vacations or weddings, are more likely to activate preexisting knowledge bases and

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cognitive words will be less important for linking the events and emotions associated with such experiences. Contrary to our prediction, but supporting previous findings (Porter & Birt, 2001), there was no difference in holistic coherence scores for negative topic essays and positive topic essays. Thus our assumption, that compared to more ordinary events, stressful experiences are more incoherent, merits reexamination. Although the presence of high levels of cognitive words has been taken to indicate that these causal links lower emotional arousal, we found that overall, and particularly in essays on negative topics, increased levels of cognitive words accompanied increased levels of words denoting negative emotions. As in the previous experiments, we also found a negative relationship between the percentage of cognitive words and levels of narrative coherence. These relationships support our prediction that rather than being indices of coherence, cognitive words are used in an attempt to understand negative experiences, a process that precedes the development of a coherent narrative. Finally, our analyses indicated that the use of the past tense was correlated with holistic coherence scores but not with the presence of cognitive words. These findings mirror the data obtained in the first two studies. The absence of a relationship between levels of cognitive words and use of the past tense suggests that variations in the use of cognitive words are unrelated to one of the principal criteria for whether or not a narrative tells a story. There are a number of alternative explanations for our findings that should be noted. The negative or positive experiences selected might differ systematically in other ways, such as their recency, intensity, or controllability, that could contribute to the differences observed. There are also limitations regarding the generalizability of the results, particularly in regard to participants who in our study were introductory psychology students. Older individuals with greater or less interest in psychology might respond to the writing instructions very differently. One could also question whether our results obtained in an expressive writing paradigm would generalize to other single experience autobiographical accounts such as self-initiated reminiscences, to multi-episode life stories, or to narratives revealed in therapeutic settings.


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General Discussion The purpose of these studies was to investigate the relationship between narrative coherence defined as the use of cognitive words and narrative coherence defined holistically as the degree to which a story produces an integrated mental representation in its audience. Pennebaker and others have argued that the increasing use of cognitive words in the writing samples is evidence of increasing coherence or “constructing a story over time” (Pennebaker, 2000, p. 10). The results from our studies were consistent with the idea that cognitive word use lacks construct validity as an indicator of narrative coherence, but rather reflects a search-for-meaning process that precedes narrative coherence. To recap, the results from the first study found that songs that tell a clear story contained fewer cognitive words and a greater percentage of past tense verbs than songs that do not tell a story. In the second study, participants used fewer cognitive words and had higher holistic coherence scores when prompted to write in a story format, as opposed to the standard expressive writing prompt to explore your “very deepest thoughts and feelings” about the event. In the third study, use of cognitive words was more prevalent in descriptions of personal negative events and were associated with more words denoting negative emotions. Holistic coherence scores were positively related to the use of past tense. We posit that use of cognitive words when describing stressful personal experiences reflects an active process of searching for meaning, understanding causal relationships, and updating schemas. A similar meaning of cognitive word use has been suggested by others (Junghaenel, Smyth, & Santner, 2008). We believe this active process to be a precursor to a coherent narrative. Once an individual has achieved a sense of meaning and an understanding of the causal relationships concerning a stressful event, then the individual has the necessary prerequisites to create a coherent narrative story of the experience. As we noted in the discussions following each study, the experimental designs and the findings present a number of limitations to the validity of our results. First, the texts we studied may have unique characteristics because of their genre, their authors, and the circumstances of their production. In particular, the expressive writing essays may differ from other longer writing samples, samples produced with differ-

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ent prompts, or spoken narratives where an audience or therapist is present. Second, the inverse correlation between the word count and holistic systems may arise because the former system is sensitive to the semantics of the text and the latter to its structure. These characteristics may be linked in other types of text as well. Because neither system is sensitive to the thematic content of the song lyrics we selected or the essays produced in emotional disclosure experiments, it is possible that our analysis has overlooked other important factors, such as a writer’s success or failure in response to the stressful event (Heatherton & Nichols, 1994). Third, although it is widely assumed that written or spoken narrative mirrors or reflects internal representations of events, there are obvious constraints on how people describe their experiences, their sensitivity to demand characteristics regarding both content and format and their needs to have their stories make sense to themselves and others (Nezlek & Leary, 2002). Our interpretation of the data assumes that people are able to monitor their own cognitive processes (Schank & Abelson, 1995). We would suggest that an author’s finding difficulty in constructing a narrative signals a problem with accessing and integrating the memories, thoughts, and emotions needed to construct the narrative. The typical instructions used in structured writing research request participants to write about a negative, stressful, or traumatic event, to get in touch with their deepest thoughts and feelings, and to tie it all together. These instructions essentially direct participants to make causal inferences. Our thesis is that when writers have trouble making the inferences required to comprehend events that have occurred in their own lives, they turn to explicit causal connectors in an attempt to establish causal cohesiveness. Although our data indicate that low levels of cognitive word use occur once a coherent narrative has been established, there is another explanation for this effect. Cohn et al. (2004) argue that the decline in on-line journal keepers’ use of cognitive words two weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks reflect the toll of long-term stress on peoples’ capacity to understand and cope with the meaning of the attacks. Fivush, Edwards, and Mennuti-Washburn (2003) make a related argument, that lower levels of cognitive words in descriptions of a stressful experience occur when individuals are having difficulty coping with the experience. The correlational nature of these data and the absence of direct measures of stress make the validity


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of such an interpretation problematic. Our findings suggest another possibility: that the decline in cognitive words reflects the authors’ construction of a coherent mental representation of the events such that their description no longer requires usage of numerous explicit cognitive words. An important contribution of our experiments is the introduction of a system for evaluating narrative coherence in autobiographical accounts that is reliable and has construct validity. Despite widespread acceptance of the importance of narrative coherence in people’s accounts of traumatic experiences, in their life stories and in the development of the self-concept, there has been little work devoted to measures of coherence. Use of Katz’s system, or one similar to it, will allow progress on several important research fronts. In regard to clinical implications, our findings should interest researchers pursuing the relationship between coherence and mental and physical health outcomes. They also touch on the design of interventions targeted at unhealthy and addictive behaviors for individuals who maintain coherent narratives that behavioral change is impossible because of constraints imposed by biology, destiny, or society (Prochaska & Prochaska, 1999). Our findings are also relevant to researchers interested in the development of life stories, how these stories change with retelling, and the use of these as historical data. Diaries, letters, blogs, etc., can be fruitfully analyzed using this approach. Finally the results speak to the traditional distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought (Bruner, 1986). The paradigmatic mode is typified by abstract general laws, formal deductive reasoning and is exemplified in causal relationships. The narrative mode deals with stories about typical experiences, may be logically inconsistent, but is internally coherent. Baumeister and Newman (1994) argue that individuals construct autobiographical narratives that subsequently produce paradigmatic knowledge and guide social behavior. In contrast, results of our experiments suggest that the use of cognitive words signals attempts to employ paradigmatic knowledge during a search for meaning that occurs prior to the development of a coherent narrative. Given the importance of peoples’ stories for other outcomes in their lives, how they decide which propositions require causal linkages to make sense of an experience and how these linkages provide a foundation for narrative coherence are questions deserving future research.

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