Seeing your life story as a Hero's Journey increases meaning in life.

IF 6.4 1区心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL

Journal of personality and social psychology Pub Date : 2023-10-01 Epub Date: 2023-03-27 DOI:10.1037/pspa0000341

Benjamin A Rogers, Herrison Chicas, John Michael Kelly, Emily Kubin, Michael S Christian, Frank J Kachanoff, Jonah Berger, Curtis Puryear, Dan P McAdams, Kurt Gray

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.g., Beowulf) and blockbuster books and movies (e.g., Harry Potter). Eight studies reveal that the Hero's Journey predicts and can causally increase people's experience of meaning in life. We first distill the Hero's Journey into seven key elements-protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy-and then develop a new measure that assesses the perceived presence of the Hero's Journey narrative in people's life stories: the Hero's Journey Scale. Using this scale, we find a positive relationship between the Hero's Journey and meaning in life with both online participants (Studies 1-2) and older adults in a community sample (Study 3). We then develop a restorying intervention that leads people to see the events of their life as a Hero's Journey (Study 4). This intervention causally increases meaning in life (Study 5) by prompting people to reflect on important elements of their lives and connecting them into a coherent and compelling narrative (Study 6). This Hero's Journey restorying intervention also increases the extent to which people perceive meaning in an ambiguous grammar task (Study 7) and increases their resilience to life's challenges (Study 8). These results provide initial evidence that enduring cultural narratives like the Hero's Journey both reflect meaningful lives and can help to create them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

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把你的人生故事看作英雄之旅，会增加生活的意义。

生活的意义与人们讲述的生活故事息息相关。我们探讨一个永恒的故事——英雄之旅——是否会让人们的生活更有意义。这个经久不衰的故事出现在历史和文化中，为古代神话（如《贝奥武夫》）和畅销书和电影（如《哈利·波特》）提供了模板。八项研究表明，《英雄游记》预测并能增加人们对生命意义的体验。我们首先将《英雄之旅》提炼为七个关键元素——主角、转变、追求、盟友、挑战、转变、遗产，然后开发了一种新的衡量标准，来评估人们对英雄之旅叙事在生活故事中的感知：英雄之旅量表。使用这个量表，我们发现在线参与者（研究1-2）和社区样本中的老年人（研究3）的英雄之旅与生活意义之间存在积极关系。然后，我们开发了一种补充库存的干预措施，引导人们将他们生活中的事件视为英雄之旅（研究4）。这种干预通过促使人们反思生活中的重要元素，并将其连接成连贯而引人注目的叙事，从而增加了生活的意义（研究5）（研究6）。这种英雄之旅的补充干预也增加了人们在模糊语法任务中感知意义的程度（研究7），并增加了他们对生活挑战的应变能力（研究8）。这些结果提供了初步证据，证明像《英雄之旅》这样经久不衰的文化叙事既反映了有意义的生活，也有助于创造这些生活。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of personality and social psychology PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL-

CiteScore

12.70

自引率

3.90%

发文量

250

期刊介绍： Journal of personality and social psychology publishes original papers in all areas of personality and social psychology and emphasizes empirical reports, but may include specialized theoretical, methodological, and review papers.Journal of personality and social psychology is divided into three independently edited sections. Attitudes and Social Cognition addresses all aspects of psychology (e.g., attitudes, cognition, emotion, motivation) that take place in significant micro- and macrolevel social contexts.