ABSTRACT

This is where our book comes to an end, but research on scientific narrative psychology has barely begun. The studies presented in Chapter 10 and the linguistic parsing modules of the various psychological constructs, for example mentalization or agency discussed in these studies, are still under development; similarly, the already completed and tested content analysis programs developed for scientific narrative psychology require further fine-tuning. There is a lot more technical work to be done, which affects fundamental questions in psychology and language technology, before the main historical issues and problems of cultural evolution raised in the first few chapters of this book can be addressed in concrete research projects. Nevertheless, we believe that we have accomplished our main goal. We started from the assumption that people construe themselves in and by stories in several important respects. In narratives they express how their experience and relationship to the social world is organized in the course of meaning construction, and how they create their identity. Moreover, we supposed that the qualities of this experience can give us important pieces of information concerning the behavioural adaptation of a storytelling person and the ways and chances of coping with different situations in his or her life too. So as to get a better understanding of these qualities of experience and ways of organizing experience, we have developed the method of the narrative psychological content analysis, which can reliably unravel psychologically relevant contents of meaning from the linguistic figures of narrative. In other words, we took seriously the relationship between language and human mental processes and between narrative and identity, and by analysing narrative language as a complex pattern carrying mental content we obtained scientific knowledge concerning the psychological processes of human social adaptation at both individual and group levels.