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The examination of master narrative models of identity development seems to be an important task in each national culture, as the culturally shared stories may vary in structure and topics. This article aims to identify Polish biographical master narratives. The study focuses on life-story interviews collected from a sample of 131 Polish adults. The examination of common themes of biographical narratives in Polish culture—suffering, home, and freedom—led us to identify three different dominant positions toward them: Traditional, Romantic, and Bildung. The results revealed that 37 analyzed life stories belonged to the traditional type, 22 to Romantic, and 18 to Bildung. 54 narratives represented the coexistence of two or three of the aforesaid types. Our research revealed that it is difficult to describe the Polish biographical narratives using one main type of master and one alternative narrative, as the participants find a way of managing the deviations from one type of master narrative by using its other type (one or more) and they reach for more than one type of master narrative, even without questioning any of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how the appearance of post-traumatic growth as a result of a traumatic event is affected by the extent to which the experiencing self dominates the narrating self (concepts introduced by Franz Stanzel). The experiencing self describes its feelings, needs, and desires, and reveals its own attitudes toward the situation and its circumstances. The narrating self aims to give a detailed account of the event, circumstances and its own actions, without saying much about its emotional state. Seventy-eight Polish women were asked to recount their traumatic experiences and answer questions about how the experience had affected their thinking about themselves and their world-view. The participants narratives were analyzed in terms of the dominance of either the experiencing self or the narrating self, or their possible balance. The participants also filled out questionnaires to measure post-traumatic growth and sense of purpose in life. The qualitative analysis suggested that greater post-traumatic growth was reported by women for whom the experiencing self either dominated in the narratives over the narrating self, or was balanced with the equally developed story of the narrating self. However, the quantitative analysis distinguished only between the experiencing self and narrating self positions, with the former demonstrating greater post-traumatic growth, whereas narratives that balanced both voices were intermediate in the comparison and were not distinguished from the other more pure positions. Taken as a whole, results support the inference that narration from an emotion-focused internal perspective facilitates personal growth in the face of very difficult life events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the Identity Dynamics Questionnaire (IDQ) as a method for measuring identity processes and modes included in the identity dynamics model by Oleś. The model refers to general processes of personality development that underlie identity functioning located on two dimensions: the internal experience and the external activity. The new tool was created to validly and reliably operationalize the theoretical proposition and to verify its assumptions and relations between components of the model. Four studies were conducted as successive stages of constructing the IDQ. Studies 1 and 2 aimed to exploratory setting the content of subscales designed to measure four identity processes (integration, reconstruction, adaptation, expansion - part A of the IDQ) and four identity modes (stabilization, fluidity, amplification, pliability - part B of the IDQ). Studies 3 and 4 served to confirmatory analyses concerning the structure of the IDQ and show its validity. The studies showed satisfactory psychometric properties of current version of the new method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Posttraumatic growth (PTG) is related to positive psychological changes following people's struggle with trauma. The PTG model suggests that one of its possible consequences may be higher motivation towards helping behaviours. The aim of the research was to explore the influence of cancer illness on the motivation to help others, as perceived by participants, and the mechanisms behind such behaviour. PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to explore the main motives to help others among cancer patients. The study also investigated the relation of perceived growth (PTG) and the frequency of providing help. Female cancer patients (n = 100) completed a Polish version of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory and a questionnaire measuring frequency of providing help towards ill and healthy individuals. Some of the subjects (n = 29) were also interviewed to assess the main perceived motives to help others. RESULTS Positive rho Spearman correlations between PTG and the frequency of help given towards ill individuals and healthy ones were found. Based on thematic analysis four motives of helping were identified: empathy, self-enhancement, internalized standards of behaviour, searching for the sense of life. CONCLUSIONS This findings highlight the positive association between cancer patients' involvement in helping other cancer patients and positive life changes after experience of cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study focused on relationships between personality traits, self-efficacy, self-esteem and basic trust, and well-being in context of entrepreneurial activity. Participants were 301 unemployed people, 157 of whom had received a grant from an employment agency to start their own business. Participants completed measures of personality traits, self-efficacy, self-esteem, basic trust, satisfaction with life, positive and negative affect. To verify if beliefs about the self and about the world mediated relationships between personality traits and well-being we conducted a multiple-sample SEM. The study results confirm that the beliefs mediate relationships between personality traits and well-being. They also show that different types of beliefs serve a different function, depending on an individual's circumstances. Among grant acceptors, self-efficacy did not impact well-being, while self-esteem and basic trust had similar functions in both groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to examine narratives of the personal religious, spiritual and mystical experiences of adult Poles (N = 74) and their impact on narrative identity. The method for collecting qualitative data about individual understandings and spiritual, religious and mystical experiences was the narrative interview, developed on the basis of the Life Story Interview. During the analysis, the following key topics were identified: awareness of the presence/protection of God, a peak experience, the awareness of oneness with nature and the world, and a sense of closeness/contact with a person who has died. This study provides specific information on the spiritual, religious and mystical experiences of the investigated group of Poles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to verify the hypothesis that positive affective tone of narratives is connected to the experience of posttraumatic growth among transplant patients. Kidney transplant patients (N = 51) and liver transplant patients (N = 48) participated in the study. In the first stage, about 10 weeks after transplant, the participants told two stories about important, freely chosen events from their lives. During the second meeting 10-12 months later we measured posttraumatic growth. Results indicated that the affective tone of narratives about past events was associated with the level of post-traumatic growth measured 10-12 months later. This proves that the affective tone of narratives about life, understood as a relatively constant individual characteristic, promote posttraumatic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basic trust is a presumption that the world has unchangeable order and meaning and is generally positive towards human beings. The results of three separate studies on oncology patients indicate that level of basic trust is positively related to the challenge approach, positive reinterpretation of new life situations, and posttraumatic growth. Structural equation modeling shows that positive reinterpretation, the lack of any dominant anxiety, and hopelessness-helplessness reactions are mediators in the relationship between basic trust and posttraumatic growth after a traumatic experience with cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hope, defined as a cognitive set of beliefs concerning goal-related activities and comprising agency thinking and pathways thinking, is considered both as a relatively stable disposition and as a momentary state. To expand knowledge on state hope, we validated its measure by testing alternative factorial models. With two cross-sectional studies, we aimed to validate the factorial structure of the Polish version of the State Hope Scale (SHS-PL). Study 1 involved 242 Polish employees (158 women) aged 18-64 years, and Study 2 involved 953 Polish adults (704 women) aged 18 to 75 years. The results demonstrated that the bifactor model was the best representation of the structure of state hope. It simultaneously captures the global aspect of state hope and its two specific dimensions: agency and pathways. The results also revealed that the SHS-PL scores showed full scalar invariance across genders and across two age groups. Finally, the total score as well as the agency and pathways scales achieved acceptable levels of reliability (in both studies, the Cronbach's a coefficient was greater than .85 for all scales) and validity: Correlations of the SHSPL scores with dispositional hope and with positive and negative affect conformed to the theoretically expected pattern of results. The results provide evidence supporting the postulated structure of state hope and validate the new Polish-language version of its measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the relationships between posttraumatic growth (PTG) and posttraumatic depreciation (PTD) across 10 countries and assessed the factorial invariance of the standardized inventory assessing PTG and PTD, the PTGDI-X, the expansion of the PTGI-X (Tedeschi et al., 2017). We also investigated the roles of social and cognitive factors in PTG and PTD. Data were collected from participants who identified that their most stressful life experience met the definition of trauma in Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nepal, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Turkey, and the US. The participants completed the PTGDI-X and inventories measuring posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, and predictor variables such as reexamination of core beliefs, centrality of the event, rumination, and disclosures. Results identified universal aspects such as equivalence of factor loadings of the PTGDI-X and the impact of positive/negative disclosure on PTG and PTD. Results also revealed culture-specific aspects, including the relationships between PTG and PTD, and different patterns of cognitive predictors for PTG and PTD. The current study offered the insight that, for the first time using international data, positive and negative post-trauma changes are not likely to be on opposing ends of one dimension, and it is essential to use the PTGDI-X to better understand both positive and negative aspects of post-traumatic experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]