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\"Author Kathlyn Conway, a three-time cancer survivor, believes that the triumphalist approach to writing about illness fails to do justice to the shattering experience of disease. By wrestling with the challenge of writing about the reality of serious illness and injury, she argues, writers can offer a truer picture of the complex relationship between body and mind\"--Provided by publisher.

This address considers the epidemiology of narratives relevant to economic fluctuations. The human brain has always been highly tuned toward narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing. Stories motivate and connect activities to deeply felt values and needs. Narratives \"go viral\" and spread far, even worldwide, with economic impact. The 1920-1921 Depression, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the so-called Great Recession of 2007-2009, and the contentious political-economic situation of today are considered as the results of the popular narratives of their respective times. Though these narratives are deeply human phenomena that are difficult to study in a scientific manner, quantitative analysis may help us gain a better understanding of these epidemics in the future.

Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative experience of social interactions for readers. This simulation facilitates the communication and understanding of social information and makes it more compelling, achieving a form of learning through experience. Engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.

This article uses data from a qualitative case study to help support and further develop an argument about the uses of futuristic-hypothetical narratives of self as a tool to educate desire through imagination. First, existing research about the role of the future in the creation of new experience in narrative approaches to history, psychology, and sociology will be brought into dialogue. Via such interchange, the claim will be made that: (1) the creation of new experience requires seeing a difference between past and future selves, (2) for this difference to have motivating force in the present it has to be perceived as experientially close, and (3) experiential closeness is a cultural as much as personal matter that depends on the perceived believability of desired future selves. Second, we explore how this tension between difference (distance) and closeness (proximity) is discursively and narratively constructed by young unemployed people in Greece who wrote and shared narratives of desired future selves. Finally, we propose that the intricacies of an education of desire as constructed by these young people may represent a need of the modern world.

This paper examines how earnings performance relates to firms' narrative R&D disclosure decisions. The unique nature of R&D investments and financial statements' limited ability to communicate the value of such investments highlight the role of narrative disclosure as a supplement to the financial statements. I predict and find that current earnings performance (adjusted for R&D expense) is negatively related to the quantity of narrative R&D disclosure. Conducting a content analysis of the detail, tone, and readability of narrative R&D disclosures, I find that managers adjust R&D disclosures based on earnings performance to provide relevant information rather than to obfuscate performance. Finally, I provide evidence that market participants find narrative R&D disclosure informative because it significantly affects sell-side analyst behavior, disclosure information content, and information asymmetry.

Chronic pain, affecting more than 20% of the global population, has an enormous pernicious impact on individuals as well as economic ramifications at both the health and social levels. Accordingly, tools that enhance pain assessment can considerably impact people suffering from pain and society at large. In this context, assessment methods based on individuals' personal experiences, such as written narratives (WNs), offer relevant insights into understanding pain from a personal perspective. This approach can uncover subjective, intricate, and multifaceted aspects that standardized questionnaires can overlook. However, WNs can be time-consuming for clinicians. Therefore, a tool that uses WNs while reducing the time required for their evaluation could have a significantly beneficial impact on people's pain assessment. This study is the first evaluation of the potential of applying large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians in assessing patients' pain expressed through WNs. We performed an experiment based on 43 WNs made by people with fibromyalgia and qualitatively evaluated in a prior study. Focusing on pain severity and disability, we prompt GPT-4 (with temperature parameter settings 0 or 1) to assign scores and scores' explanations, to these WNs. Then, we quantitatively compare GPT-4 scores with experts' scores of the same narratives, using statistical measures such as Pearson correlations, root mean squared error, the weighted version of the Gwet agreement coefficient, and Krippendorff α. Additionally, 2 experts specialized in chronic pain conducted a qualitative analysis of the scores' explanation to assess their accuracy and potential applicability of GPT's analysis for future pain narrative evaluations. Our analysis reveals that GPT-4's performance in assessing pain narratives yielded promising results. GPT-4 was comparable in terms of agreement with experts (with a weighted percentage agreement higher than 0.95), correlations with standardized measurements (for example in the range of 0.43 and 0.49 between the Revised Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire and GTP-4 with temperatures 1), and low error rates (root mean squared error of 1.20 for severity and 1.44 for disability). Moreover, experts generally deemed the ratings provided by GPT-4, as well as the scores' explanation, to be adequate. However, we observe that GPT has a slight tendency to overestimate pain severity and disability with a lower SD than expert estimates. These findings underline the potential of LLMs in facilitating the assessment of WNs of people with fibromyalgia, offering a novel approach to understanding and evaluating patient pain experiences. Integrating automated assessments through LLMs presents opportunities for streamlining and enhancing the assessment process, paving the way for improved patient care and tailored interventions in the chronic pain management field.

Aim To explore aspects of professional identity in nurses’ written narratives of what is significant to their choice to remain in the profession. Design This study used a qualitative design and was underpinned by a hermeneutical approach. Methods The participants were recruited via purposive sampling procedures and included 13 nurses aged 26 to 62 years. The data were collected in the form of written narratives to initiate the nurses’ reflections on the decision to remain in the profession. A thematic analysis was conducted. Results The analysis revealed two themes: acting as a professional contributor and realigning to maintain professional belongingness. In the nurses’ written narratives, these aspects of professional identity were clearly significant to their choice to remain in the profession. In a complexly interwoven way, the aspects constructed who the nurses were as professionals, and thus, professional identity seems to play a critical role in the choice to remain.

Studies on translanguaging of multilingual students have turned their attention to teachable strategies in classrooms. This study is based on the assumption that it is possible to learn from students' translanguaging strategies while developing their proficiency through a dialogical pedagogy. Based on a classroom ethnography, this article describes the translanguaging strategies of a Saudi Arabian undergraduate student in her essay writing. Her strategies are classified through thematic coding of multiple forms of data: drafts of essay, journals, classroom assignments, peer review, stimulated recall, and member check. The strategies are of 4 types: recontextualization strategies, voice strategies, interactional strategies, and textualization strategies. The study describes how the feedback of the instructor and peers can help students question their choices, think critically about diverse options, assess the effectiveness of their choices, and develop metacognitive awareness. (Verlag).

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for a personally experienced and valued past, is a social emotion. It refers to significant others in the context of momentous life events and fosters a sense of social connectedness. On this basis, the authors hypothesized that (1) nostalgia promotes charitable intentions and behavior, and (2) this effect is mediated by empathy with the charity’s beneficiaries. Five studies assessed the effect of nostalgia on empathy, intentions to volunteer and donate, as well as tangible charitable behavior. Results were consistent with the hypotheses. Study 1 found that nostalgia increases charitable intentions. Study 2 showed that this salutary effect of nostalgia on charitable intentions is mediated by empathy (but not by personal distress). Studies 3 and 4 corroborated these finding for different charities and in diverse samples. Finally, study 5 demonstrated that nostalgia increases tangible charitable behavior. By virtue of its capacity to increase empathy, nostalgia facilitates prosocial reactions.