Bullying, Victimization, and Peer Harassment by Charles A Maher

Author:Charles A Maher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317787211
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

STORIES: THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The story structure weaves together all components of social informa tion processing including external events, emotions, cognitions, action plans, and outcomes and thereby functions as the “schema” that reflects their organization. Researchers taking social information processing (SIP) perspectives on aggressive behavior invoke schema-based explanations. Examples are the tendencies of aggressive children in comparison to their peers to base their interpretations on their schemas acquired from past experience without fully processing the available situational cues (Dodge & Tomlin, 1987) and to repeatedly retrieve and use scripts that call for aggressive responding (Huesmann, 1988). Despite their step-like designation in reference to a sequence of social problem-solving cognitions, the various components of social information processing are interrelated components of schemas that cohere within the story form (Table 13.1), often operate outside of awareness in day-to-day interactions (Rabiner, Lenhart, & Lochman, 1990), and are influenced by emotional traits and states (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000).

TABLE 13.1. The story as a context for social information processing. Social information processing Story

Identify the Problem:

1.

External—size up the cues in the context

2.

Internal—size up tensions, emotions, intentions, relationships

Goal of intervention: Coordinate inner and outer sources of tension

What is happening to the characters on the outside and inside? How do the different characters view the problem?

Delineate Causal Sequences:

1.

External—organize the stream of events, including time frame and cause-effect connections

2.

Internal—organize motives, feelings, or intentions driving the sequence of events

Goal of intervention: Coordinate inner world (intentions, feelings, thoughts) with the logical unfolding of external cues and events.

What happened before? What caused what to happen to whom? What is the role of emotions and intentions? What could be done given a character’s resources, intentions, feelings?

Integrate Sources of Emotion:

1.

External only—emotions or thoughts are reactive to events or external considerations

2.

Internal only—actions and reactions are short-term responses to emotional promptings

Goal of intervention: Coordinate emotions, intentions and thoughts with one another, the external context, and with proactive actions or decisions that consider self and other.

What are characters’ thoughts and feelings as well as their intentions? What are the sources of their feelings? What, if any, changes occur? How do characters link intentions, emotions, and behaviors to short- and long-term aims?

Coordinate Means—Ends Sequences:

Goal of intervention: Derive the moral or lesson of the scene or story by working backward from an outcome to understand how the inner and outer worlds shaped the decisions or actions that contributed to the outcome (i.e., did actions address the problem in the short or long run, reflect characters’true intentions, and were they realistic in light of characters’ resources or available help)?

How does the story end? What did plans, actions, decisions, events or other factors contribute to the outcome? What did each character learn? What is the lesson or moral of the story?

The meaningful organization of stressful experience into narrative form makes the emotional impact of that experience more manageable (K. J. Gergen, & M. M. Gergen, 1988). Accordingly, writing about one’s own trau matic experiences has health benefits for college students (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999) and, for healthy students, these benefits are comparable to talk ing with a therapist (Donnelly & Murray, 1991; Murray, Lamnin, & Carver, 1989).

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