e Construction of Meaning From Life Events: Empirical Studies of Personal Narratives

Abstract

Yet how is the quest for meaning structured, and what can satisfy it? Our approach to this question has been to collect rst-person narratives of people's everyday life events, such as minor interpersonal con icts and romantic heartbreak. We then compare di erent perspectives on similar events. For example, as we will describe, people who have their hearts broken o er stories about unrequited love that di er in systematic ways from the stories told by people who played the role of rejector and broke someone else's heart. Such comparisons o er a key to understanding the interpretive activity of the human mind. If the events are roughly the same in an objective sense, then the systematic di erences between the groups of stories re ect how the individual's interpretation is shaped by perspective, motivation, and bias.