Narrative self and high risk for schizophrenia: remembering the past and imagining the future

ABSTRACT

We examined the narrative self of those at high psychometric risk for schizophrenia (HR). Eighty undergraduate students wrote personal narratives about a turning-point event in their life, and about a possible future. The turning-point narratives were coded for topic, specificity, event valence, valence of causal coherence link, overall level of causal coherence, and agency. The future narratives were coded for the number and valence of goals, topic of goals, and specificity of goals. Word count was applied to all narratives. The HR group expressed lower levels of agency and a trend of lower levels of causal coherence when narrating turning-point events. When imagining their futures, HR participants produced shorter narratives and showed a trend of having fewer goals. Including the dimensions of both the turning point and the future narratives revealed that the HR group membership was best predicted by lower levels of agency and of causal coherence in the turning-point narrative, and fewer words in the future narrative. Narratives differed specifically in those few elements that are critical for the achievement of narrative continuity. Consistent with the theory, people at high risk for schizophrenia already present, to some extent, an impoverishment in their narrative sense of self.

KEYWORDS:

• Future thinking
• mental time-travel
• psychometric risk
• schizophrenia risk

Acknowledgments

We thank Claire Mitchell for helping with the coding of the data and Tracy White for her useful comments on the manuscript. Preliminary findings from this study were reported at The International Conference on Narrative, Montreal, Canada (2018), and at the Australian Psychosis Conference, Sydney, Australia (2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Hadar Hazan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7846-9624

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Otago Doctoral Scholarship.