Adding to Perspectivism
I read a great article on the NY Times website that adds to Perspectivism. The article explains that the way in which we view our lives influences our behavior.
If we see our lives from a third person perspective we can create a distance from the events and our feelings. When we see our lives from a first person perspective we tend to become attached to our emotions and we are more likely to get upset at a troubling memory. Each person interprets their life in a different way. Some may see it as wonderful, scary, hard, cool, or sexy, all depending on how they relate their memories to their present day life.
I’ve copied a few paragraphs to intrigue you and placed a link for you to continue the article at NY Times website.
This Is Your Life and How You Tell It
By BENEDICT CAREY
For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why.
Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.
Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.
Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
Go to the rest of the article at NY Times.com
