Creative recovery: Narrative creativity mitigates identity distress among young adults with cancer

Abstract

Objective: Young adults with cancer are at a heightened risk for experiencing identity distress, with adverse consequence on their satisfaction with life (SwL). This study examines the contributions of two resources thought to mitigate identity distress: parental warmth and narrative creativity.

Methods: 164 young adults divided into three groups: (a) control group (no history of life-threatening medical illness); (b) recovered group, and (c) cancer group (currently in treatment) completed measures of SwL, identity distress, parental warmth, and narrative creativity.

Findings: The cancer group was associated with higher identity distress and there was a strong contribution of identity distress in decreased SwL across groups. Narrative creativity had a significant, direct effect on reduced identity distress, indirectly increasing SwL across groups.

Implications for psychosocial providers: These findings highlight the potential of creativity to decrease identity distress and in turn, improve SwL among patients with cancer.

Keywords:

• Cancer
• emerging adulthood
• identity distress
• life satisfaction
• narrative creativity
• parental support

Acknowledgement

We thank Mansi Shah, Brianna Heuser and Michelle Zaccario for their help with various aspects of this study and manuscript preparation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The parent study (e.g., Barbot and Kaufman³⁸) included multiple measures of creative potential, parenting, identity and well-being.

2 For the sake of model simplification, age was entered as continuous covariate, whereas race and ethnicity were combined as dichotomous covariate (with 1 denoting non-Hispanic Caucasian, and 0 all other race/ethnicities).

3 A preliminary multivariate analysis of variance with covariate (MANCOVA) did not detect any overall significant effect of a model incorporating all dependent variables and covariates at risk α .05 (F_[8,300] = 1.40, p = .20). However, it revealed a negligible effect of age on narrative creativity (F_[1,153] = 5.54, p = .02, η² = .01; translating into a correlation of r = .16, p = .04).

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this article was partly supported by grant RFP-15-05 to Baptiste Barbot from the Imagination Institute (www.imagination-institute.org), funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Imagination Institute or the John Templeton Foundation.