When Peter Tappenden \u201918 arrived on campus in the fall of his senior year, he knew exactly what he wanted to study for his honors thesis in psychology. He\u2019d spent the summer in Boston, working at an outpatient program for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He was excited to learn more about the factors that make some people vulnerable to PTSD after experiencing trauma, while others are more resilient to the condition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The only hitch was that Tappenden\u2019s adviser, Rebecca Shiner, had done extensive research on personality development but had never worked on PTSD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Undaunted, the pair sat down to brainstorm. \u201cI wanted to try to find a way to support his interest in that topic,\u201d says Shiner, who is the Charles A. Dana Professor of psychological and brain sciences. \u201cI\u2019m always game to learn about something new.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She proposed that they merge Tappenden\u2019s interest in PTSD with a new interest of her own. She\u2019d been learning about a field called narrative identity. It\u2019s \u201cthe study of the way people tell the stories of their lives,\u201d Shiner explains. The research appealed to her, \u201cbecause I have a strong attraction to the humanities,\u201d she adds. Studies have shown that the style in which people describe their experiences is an important aspect of personality and may be related to mental health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tappenden and Shiner recruited 154 veterans to complete an online survey. They gave the study participants two writing prompts. The first was to describe a \u201chighly stressful\u201d event from their military experience. The second was to describe a \u201ckey scene\u201d that didn\u2019t have to be stressful. Participants also answered questions that assessed their overall well-being and symptoms of mental illnesses such as depression and PTSD. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tappenden worked with co-author Fanyi Mo \u201920 to comb through all the narratives and score them for different variables. They found two factors that correlated with the veterans\u2019 current mental health: agency and personal growth. The people whose stories about a highly stressful experience demonstrated a sense of control in their lives, and who expressed ways they had grown through their ordeal, had better mental health. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the researchers didn\u2019t see the same connection in the nonstressful \u201ckey scenes\u201d that veterans described. \u201cThere\u2019s something important about reflecting back on these highly stressful events, specifically,\u201d Shiner says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The results suggest that veterans who can draw meaning from potentially traumatic experiences in the past are mentally better off today. Shiner says the findings lined up with what other narrative identity studies have shown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs a first step, I think the results are really interesting and important,\u201d Shiner says. The group published their findings in 2021 in the Journal of Traumatic Stress<\/em>. She hopes there will be further studies of narrative identity in veterans that tease out the factors that might make some people more vulnerable to PTSD. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tappenden is now in graduate school at Northern Illinois University, studying PTSD in first responders. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he says, there\u2019s been \u201calmost an unprecedented level of distress placed on those populations.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n He hopes to one day work with patients with PTSD, while continuing to research ways to improve their care. With the veteran study, Tappenden says, he was struck by just how long the effects of trauma can reverberate. Many of the vets in his sample had served in Vietnam, as long as half a century ago. \u201cAnd still, the way that they reflect back on these highly stressful events from their service was important for their present functioning,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After dipping her toe into the field of narrative identity, \u201cI now really love this line of research,\u201d Shiner says. In an ongoing study, she\u2019s looking at the narratives of a group of Colgate students. She started gathering data on the students\u2019 personalities before the pandemic, and now the students have written twice about scenes from their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Shiner hopes analyzing these stories will reveal something about whether the students\u2019 styles of narration affect how well they \u201cThe stories themselves are often so engaging,\u201d Shiner says. \u201cThere\u2019s something very special about doing this kind of research in psychology, because it\u2019s very close to the lived experience of the person.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PTSD research finds that the way veterans tell their own stories predicts their mental health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1260,"featured_media":9020,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[553,693,969,81,970,967,267,971,968],"coauthors":[595],"class_list":["post-9017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-discover","tag-covid-19","tag-depression","tag-effects","tag-mental-health","tag-personal-growth","tag-ptsd","tag-research","tag-stress","tag-veterans"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-2lr","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2022\/04\/Colgate-final-300dpi.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9017"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9510,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9017\/revisions\/9510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9017"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nare coping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n