The current study aimed to provide a subcultural analysis of mental toughness in a high-performance context in sport.
Using Schein's (1990) framework of organisational culture, an exploratory ...qualitative analysis, employing focus group and individual interviews, was used to investigate mental toughness in an Australian Football League club.
Nine senior coaches and players participated in focus group and individual interviews. Photo elicitation was used as a method to capture mental toughness through the identification of prominent club artefacts. Participants were considered to have significant subcultural knowledge of their football club and were willing to describe personal experiences and perceptions of mental toughness through this cultural lens. Deductive and inductive analyses were conducted to capture the core themes of mental toughness across the disparate levels of Schein's organisational framework.
Mental toughness was found to be a socially derived term marked by unrelenting standards and sacrificial displays. These acts were underpinned by subcultural values emphasising a desire for constant improvement, a team first ethos, relentless effort, and the maintenance of an infallible image. At its core, mental toughness was assumed to be an internal concept, epitomised an idealised form of masculinity, elitist values, and was rhetorically depicted through metaphors of war.
It may be difficult to understand mental toughness without giving attention to the contextual norms related to the term. Appreciating how people promote, instil, and internalise prized ideals coveted as mental toughness could be intriguing for future research in sport psychology.
•Rarely has mental toughness been considered a product of sport culture.•Mental toughness was examined in the performance context of an AFL club.•Mental toughness related to certain behaviours, artefacts, values, and assumptions.•Subcultural ideals define what mental toughness is or is not.
The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quest for Identity explores the nineteenth-century author Robert Louis Stevenson’s psychological journey from a constricted and religious family of ...Scottish engineers to a life of imagination and adventure that culminated in the South Seas island of Samoa. Drawing on contemporary theories of identity development, the author traces how Stevenson overcame Victorian dualities of piety versus passion in his personal life and artistic works, gradually edging toward a more modernist and complicated moral vision. This first full-length psychobiographical analysis of Stevenson follows the trajectory of his life, while highlighting how key memories and conflicts within his personality shaped the narrative structure and themes of his most celebrated works, Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Stevenson’s relationships to his parents, wife, Fanny, and circle of intimate friends also play a prominent role in this investigation of his emerging identity and artistic work. Drawing on Stevenson’s extensive volumes of correspondence, personal memoirs, essays, novels, stories, and poems, as well as historical documents, multiple biographies, and critical studies, the author uses his background as a clinical psychologist and researcher in personality science to provide new insights into Stevenson’s psychological development. In doing so, he helps to unlock the mystery of how a sickly youth confined to the “land of the counterpane” grew up to become the author of some of the world’s most beloved and enduring works of adventure and fantasy.
Objective: "We-ness," a couple's mutual investment in their relationship and in each other, has been found to be a potent dimension of couple resilience. This study examined the development of a ...method to capture We-ness in psychotherapy through the coding of relationship narratives co-constructed by couples ("We-Stories"). It used a coding system to identify the core thematic elements that make up these narratives. Method: Couples that self-identified as "happy" (N = 53) generated We-Stories and completed measures of relationship satisfaction and mutuality. These stories were then coded using the We-Stories coding manual. Results and Conclusions: Findings indicated that security, an element that involves aspects of safety, support, and commitment, was most common, appearing in 58.5% of all narratives. This element was followed by the elements of pleasure (49.1%) and shared meaning/vision (37.7%). The number of "We-ness" elements was also correlated with and predictive of discrepancy scores on measures of relationship mutuality, indicating the validity of the We-Stories coding manual. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
This study examines four dimensions of self‐defining memory (specificity, meaning, content, and affect) and their relationship to self‐restraint, distress, and defensiveness. The development and ...validation of a protocol for measuring specificity, meaning, and affect in self‐defining memories is discussed. Specificity is operationalized as the temporal and detailed specificity of the narrative. Meaning refers to the participant's stepping back from the narrative to derive higher personal meaning or a life lesson. Affect reflects subjective emotion upon recall. Agreement between two raters scoring 1040 memories was κ=.83 for specificity and κ=.72 for meaning. The protocol is compatible with Thorne and McLean's scoring system for content (the types of events in memories). The current study compared individual differences in the four dimensions of 10 self‐defining memories collected from 103 undergraduates to scores of self‐restraint, distress, and repressive defensiveness, as measured by the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory. Memory specificity was inversely related to repressive defensiveness, while greater memory meaning was linked to moderate and high levels of self‐restraint. Memory content and affect predicted individuals' degree of subjective distress. Based on these findings, the authors discuss the place of self‐defining memories in Conway and Pleydell‐Pearce's Self‐Memory System model of autobiographical memory and personality, more generally.
The astonishingly rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) raises fundamental questions about human-generated narratives that express personal experiences. First-person narratives that emerge from ...autobiographical memory are shared frequently as a fundamental form of human activity and play a central role in maintaining relationships, guiding future behavior, and maintaining self-continuity. We generated first-person narratives using prompts with Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and tested whether human participants could discriminate AI-generated from human-generated first-person narratives. Participants ( N = 101) from Prolific rated five randomly selected narratives as human- or AI-generated and explained their choices. Participants were more accurate than chance (65%) and were more accurate rating human-generated than AI-generated narratives. When participants cited grammar and writing to explain their decisions, they were highly accurate, but when citing emotional expression, they performed at chance levels. Initial results suggest that comparing human- to AI-generated narratives provides insight into how personal narratives might express qualities of an identifiably human self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
•Applies narrative identity analysis to prototypical self-defining memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.•An example of a psychobiographical case study connecting to conceptions of the Good ...Life.•Explores where spiritual dimensions of human experience fit in the field of personality.
Abraham Heschel (1907–1972) was a Jewish theologian and rabbi who grew up in Poland, received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin, and fled from the Nazis to the United States prior to World War II. Heschel was widely respected for his books about human beings’ engaged relationship with God and later for his civil rights and anti-war activism. His most enduring message was that religion's truth lies not in purging of sin or worshipping divine perfection, but in recognition of God’s intimate and felt presence in human lives.This articleillustrates how Heschel’s narrative identity and perspective on the “good life” can be traced through a specific evocative self-defining memory from his life, a “prototypical scene.” A psychobiographical analysis demonstrates how this memory meets all five criteria of the prototypical scene. The analysis draws on Heschel’s books, poetry, and essays, multiple secondary sources, and interviews with his biographer, Edward Kaplan and his daughter, Susannah Heschel. It also contrasts Heschel vision of a “God-centered” life with contemporary psychological perspectives on what constitutes a “good life.” It concludes by highlighting how narrative memory analysis can provide depth and dimension to personality psychology.
Using a life story approach, Hardy and colleagues present a study examining the similarities and differences in the psychosocial development of UK-based elite and super-elite athletes. We found this ...work to be a highly personal account into the lives of these cohorts, which advances knowledge concerning the psychology and influencing events and circumstances that separate the good from the great performers. We make some suggestions for how to enrich the study's findings and approach, by (1) adopting McAdams' multilayer framework of personality, as an overarching structure for assessing the whole person, and (2) encouraging the authors to explore the narrative structure of the presented life stories and go beyond simply an interpretation of their content.
Both Loewald's relational theory of memory and the Self-Memory System (SMS) of cognitive neuroscience describe a dual memory system, one system that is experience-near sensory-perceptual, and the ...other, symbolic and conceptual. In contrast to perspectives that locate therapeutic action in either altering implicit procedural memories or interpreting explicit historical content, we argue that psychological health emerges from effective integration of both memory systems, achieved through a combination of transference dynamics and analytic insight. We support this position by elaborating four key assumptions of the Loewaldian and SMS perspectives, followed by application to a clinical example. We highlight the power of certain integrative autobiographical memories called 'self-defining memories' in assisting an understanding of transference dynamics and providing metaphoric touchstones to guide subsequent treatment.
The authors critically assess the dimension of individualism-collectivism (I-C) and its various uses in cross-cultural psychology. They argue that I-C research is characterized largely by ...insufficient conceptual clarity and a lack of systematic data. As a result, they call into question the utility of I-C as an explanatory tool for cultural variation in behavior, suggest alternative dimensions for cross-cultural research, and interpret the weaknesses of research on I-C as illustrative of a general trend in social psychology.
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