Jefferson A Singer
Biographic Data
| ID | 4501425 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jefferson A Singer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jefferson A |
| FAMILY NAME | Singer |
| SIGNATURE | SINGER J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Connecticut College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7882-3715 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
What might we learn about autobiographical narrative processing from Artificial Intelligence
Human beings are innately storytellers. Large Language Model AI algorithms (LLMs) like ChatGPT are not. But what ChatGPT produces, when instructed to generate or interpret a narrative, is powerful and can provide insight into human narrative processing, because it is trained to produce narratives from human sources. Our paper explores these ideas. In the first section we review key concepts from narrative identity theory and research, including a…
Self-defining memories and past academic stress in Chinese and American college students: A replication and extension of Wang and Singer (2021)
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.622527) finding that Chinese college students from the People's Republic of China (PRC) recalled more self-defining memories (SDMs) focused on high school academic stress than their American counterparts. Seventy-eight American students from a private 4-year liberal arts college and 96 Chinese students from 13 different Chinese universities recalled two SDMs and rated them for affect, recall frequency, and impor…
Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue
This Special Issue of Journal of Personality , focused on psychobiographies of social change agents, aims to make contributions to the field in terms of content, method, and process. The content of the issue is focused on understanding people who powerfully impact their world, from eminent global leaders to everyday change agents. The contributions to the Special Issue are unified by their adoption of psychobiographical methods, though as a set t…
The Role and Function of Autobiographical Memory Narratives during the Emotional Processing of Breast Cancer Treatment: An Empirically-Derived Memory Coding System
Breast cancer (BC) in younger age is a critical and potentially traumatic experience that can interrupt the continuity of self-narrative during a crucial phase. In the Narrative Identity framework the translation of memories into autobiographical narratives is an internal and external process that plays a key role in meaning-making, social relationships and self-coherence. The aim of this study is to examine the role and function that autobiograp…
Self‐defining memories—Narrative features in relation to adaptive and maladaptive personality traits (replication and extension of Blagov & Singer, 2004)
OBJECTIVE: Self-defining memories (SDMs) are units of life-story analysis, whose features resemble elements from narrative identity's factorial structure. To bridge narrative-identity and personality-trait domains, we conducted a replication and extension of prior research. METHOD: We linked four SDM features - affect, specificity, meaning making, and content - to the Big Three trait domains of personality and psychopathology in a small sample th…
O’er the hilltops is the word of God” – Abraham Joshua Heschel’s prototypical self-defining memory and its relationship to his vision of the good life
Repetition is the scent of the hunt: A clinician’s application of narrative identity to a longitudinal life study
The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson's Quest for Identity
"This first full-length psychobiographical analysis of Stevenson examines his life story, providing new insights into how his most significant memories and conflicts 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."
Et Ego in Arcadia Vixi
Chapter 5 brings the Stevensons to the south of France and focuses on his composition of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Confined for long stretches to his bed, often feverish and prone to fits of coughing blood, Stevenson attempts to write his first serious novel, Prince Otto, but amuses himself with creating a collection of poems set in the garden of his grandfather’s manse and the bedroom of his Heriot Row home. On the surface, a book for children…
The varieties of remembered experience: Moving memory beyond the bounded self
We review the contributions to this Special Issue that highlight the diverse ways in which memory takes place that go beyond the standard personal autobiographical memory and its reliance on internal imagery. We look at how contributors explore a highly individual memory of trauma and re-consider it as a complex, socially contested phenomenon. We next turn to a discussion of shared memory within dyads and then look at a contribution that examines…
Living in the amber cloud: A life story analysis of a heroin addict
Self‐Defining Memories, Scripts, and the Life Story: Narrative Identity in Personality and Psychotherapy
An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long‐term self to generate autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life‐story memories , which in turn become self‐defining memories when linked to an individual's enduring concerns. Self‐defining memories that share repetitive emotion‐outcome sequences yield narrative sc…
Lost in Translation? Finding the Person in the Emerging Paradigm of Clinical Science: Introduction to a Special Issue on Personality Psychology and Psychotherapy
Reconsidering therapeutic action: Loewald, cognitive neuroscience and the integration of memory’s duality
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 …
Should we forget forgetting
Paul Connerton's inquiry in Memory Studies into the seven types of forgetting highlights forgetting as an active rather than passive process in both individual and larger cultural memory. The present article suggests that `forgetting' may be re-interpreted as a problem of relative accessibility from a larger store of available memory. Seen in this light, emotion, meaning and goal relevance are likely to affect a given memory's personal or cultura…
Telling losses: Personality correlates and functions of bereavement narratives
The Transmission of Birth Stories from Mother to Daughter: Self-Esteem and Mother–Daughter Attachment
The 2003 Henry A. Murray Award Address: Introduction to David Winter's “Things I've Learned About Personality From Studying Political Leaders at a Distance”
Personality and Psychotherapy: Treating the Whole Person
The Self and Autobiographical Memory: Correspondence and Coherence
A modified version of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's Self Memory System (SMS) account of autobiographical memory and the self is introduced. Modifications include discussion of a fundamental tension between adaptive correspondence (experience-near sensory-perceptual records of goal activity) and self-coherence (a more abstracted and conceptually-rich long-term store of conceptual and remembered knowledge). This tension is examined in relation to ea…
Four Dimensions of Self‐Defining Memories (Specificity, Meaning, Content, and Affect) and Their Relationships to Self‐Restraint, Distress, and Repressive Defensiveness
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 fro…
Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction
The Myth of Individualism-Collectivism: A Critical Review
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 weakne…
Personal Identity and Civic Responsibility: “Rising to the Occasion” Narratives and Generativity in Community Action Student Interns
Twenty–two students in a community action certificate program supplied “rising to the occasion” narratives during summer–long internships. They also filled out measures of generativity. Twenty–one students in an international studies certificate program that also included a summer internship served as a comparison group. Both groups reported equal personal growth from rising to the occasion experiences and no differences on measures of optimism, …
Introduction: Narrative Construction of Emotional Life
Should we forget forgetting
Paul Connerton's inquiry in Memory Studies into the seven types of forgetting highlights forgetting as an active rather than passive process in both individual and larger cultural memory. The present article suggests that `forgetting' may be re-interpreted as a problem of relative accessibility from a larger store of available memory. Seen in this light, emotion, meaning and goal relevance are likely to affect a given memory's personal or cultura…
Telling losses: Personality correlates and functions of bereavement narratives
Reconsidering therapeutic action: Loewald, cognitive neuroscience and the integration of memory’s duality
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 …
Personal Identity and Civic Responsibility: “Rising to the Occasion” Narratives and Generativity in Community Action Student Interns
Twenty–two students in a community action certificate program supplied “rising to the occasion” narratives during summer–long internships. They also filled out measures of generativity. Twenty–one students in an international studies certificate program that also included a summer internship served as a comparison group. Both groups reported equal personal growth from rising to the occasion experiences and no differences on measures of optimism, …
Cardiovascular Differentiation of Happiness, Sadness, Anger, and Fear Following Imagery and Exercise1
This study examined cardiovascular patterns following happiness, sadness, anger, fear, relaxation, and control imagery in 32 subjects while they were seated and while they exercised. Affective imagery was an effective strategy for inducing reliable patterns of systolic and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate associated with particular emotional states. Anger, rather than fear, produced the greatest overall increases in cardiovascular measures…
Affective Responses to Autobiographical Memories and Their Relationship to Long‐Term Goals
It was hypothesized that affective responses to memories could be predicted from a memory's relevance to the attainment or nonattainment of an individual's long‐term goals. In Study 1, 30 subjects received 15 goals, based upon Murray's (1938) needs, as cues to retrieve memories. They rated both affective responses to memories and the relevance of the memories to the attainment of the cuing goal. On average, affective responses were significantly …
Continulty in the Life Story: Self‐Defining Memories, Affect, and Approach/Avoidance Personal Strivings
To study affective responses to memories and their relationship to personal strivings, 117 participants (65 males, 52 females) wrote selfdefining memories and indicated their affective responses to the memories. A week later they generated personal strivings, rated them along 10 dimensions, and indicated the relevance of their memories to the strivings. Participants who recalled more memories relevant to the attainment of their strivings felt mor…
Introduction: Narrative Construction of Emotional Life
Putting Emotion in Context: Its Place Within Individual and Social Narratives
The articles presented in this special issue have located emotional responses within more complex narratives dictated by both individual histories and the larger sociocultural context. A major thesis running through these articles is that the study of emotion as a physiological response in the laboratory loses sight of the meanings expressed by emotions in interpersonal and social trans-actions. A deeper understanding of anger, love, and even bor…
The Myth of Individualism-Collectivism: A Critical Review
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 weakne…
Personal Identity and Civic Responsibility: “Rising to the Occasion” Narratives and Generativity in Community Action Student Interns
Twenty–two students in a community action certificate program supplied “rising to the occasion” narratives during summer–long internships. They also filled out measures of generativity. Twenty–one students in an international studies certificate program that also included a summer internship served as a comparison group. Both groups reported equal personal growth from rising to the occasion experiences and no differences on measures of optimism, …
The Self and Autobiographical Memory: Correspondence and Coherence
A modified version of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce's Self Memory System (SMS) account of autobiographical memory and the self is introduced. Modifications include discussion of a fundamental tension between adaptive correspondence (experience-near sensory-perceptual records of goal activity) and self-coherence (a more abstracted and conceptually-rich long-term store of conceptual and remembered knowledge). This tension is examined in relation to ea…
Four Dimensions of Self‐Defining Memories (Specificity, Meaning, Content, and Affect) and Their Relationships to Self‐Restraint, Distress, and Repressive Defensiveness
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 fro…
Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction
The 2003 Henry A. Murray Award Address: Introduction to David Winter's “Things I've Learned About Personality From Studying Political Leaders at a Distance”
Personality and Psychotherapy: Treating the Whole Person
The Transmission of Birth Stories from Mother to Daughter: Self-Esteem and Mother–Daughter Attachment
Should we forget forgetting
Paul Connerton's inquiry in Memory Studies into the seven types of forgetting highlights forgetting as an active rather than passive process in both individual and larger cultural memory. The present article suggests that `forgetting' may be re-interpreted as a problem of relative accessibility from a larger store of available memory. Seen in this light, emotion, meaning and goal relevance are likely to affect a given memory's personal or cultura…
Telling losses: Personality correlates and functions of bereavement narratives
Reconsidering therapeutic action: Loewald, cognitive neuroscience and the integration of memory’s duality
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 …
Living in the amber cloud: A life story analysis of a heroin addict
Self‐Defining Memories, Scripts, and the Life Story: Narrative Identity in Personality and Psychotherapy
An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long‐term self to generate autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life‐story memories , which in turn become self‐defining memories when linked to an individual's enduring concerns. Self‐defining memories that share repetitive emotion‐outcome sequences yield narrative sc…
Lost in Translation? Finding the Person in the Emerging Paradigm of Clinical Science: Introduction to a Special Issue on Personality Psychology and Psychotherapy
The varieties of remembered experience: Moving memory beyond the bounded self
We review the contributions to this Special Issue that highlight the diverse ways in which memory takes place that go beyond the standard personal autobiographical memory and its reliance on internal imagery. We look at how contributors explore a highly individual memory of trauma and re-consider it as a complex, socially contested phenomenon. We next turn to a discussion of shared memory within dyads and then look at a contribution that examines…
The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson's Quest for Identity
"This first full-length psychobiographical analysis of Stevenson examines his life story, providing new insights into how his most significant memories and conflicts 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."
Et Ego in Arcadia Vixi
Chapter 5 brings the Stevensons to the south of France and focuses on his composition of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Confined for long stretches to his bed, often feverish and prone to fits of coughing blood, Stevenson attempts to write his first serious novel, Prince Otto, but amuses himself with creating a collection of poems set in the garden of his grandfather’s manse and the bedroom of his Heriot Row home. On the surface, a book for children…
Repetition is the scent of the hunt: A clinician’s application of narrative identity to a longitudinal life study
Self‐defining memories—Narrative features in relation to adaptive and maladaptive personality traits (replication and extension of Blagov & Singer, 2004)
OBJECTIVE: Self-defining memories (SDMs) are units of life-story analysis, whose features resemble elements from narrative identity's factorial structure. To bridge narrative-identity and personality-trait domains, we conducted a replication and extension of prior research. METHOD: We linked four SDM features - affect, specificity, meaning making, and content - to the Big Three trait domains of personality and psychopathology in a small sample th…
O’er the hilltops is the word of God” – Abraham Joshua Heschel’s prototypical self-defining memory and its relationship to his vision of the good life
Psychology (27 works) · Identity, Memory, and Therapy (18 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Narrative (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Developmental psychology (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Autobiographical memory (8 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Personality (8 works)