Department of Organizational Behavior, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Department of Psychological Science, University of California-Irvine.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2023 Oct;125(4):752-778. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000341. Epub 2023 Mar 27.
Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.g., ) and blockbuster books and movies (e.g., ). Eight studies reveal that the Hero's Journey predicts and can causally increase people's experience of meaning in life. We first distill the Hero's Journey into seven key elements-protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy-and then develop a new measure that assesses the perceived presence of the Hero's Journey narrative in people's life stories: the Hero's Journey Scale. Using this scale, we find a positive relationship between the Hero's Journey and meaning in life with both online participants (Studies 1-2) and older adults in a community sample (Study 3). We then develop a restorying intervention that leads people to see the events of their life as a Hero's Journey (Study 4). This intervention causally increases meaning in life (Study 5) by prompting people to reflect on important elements of their lives and connecting them into a coherent and compelling narrative (Study 6). This Hero's Journey restorying intervention also increases the extent to which people perceive meaning in an ambiguous grammar task (Study 7) and increases their resilience to life's challenges (Study 8). These results provide initial evidence that enduring cultural narratives like the Hero's Journey both reflect meaningful lives and can help to create them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
人生的意义与人们讲述的自身故事息息相关。我们探索了一个永恒的故事——英雄之旅，它是否能让人们的生活更有意义。这个经久不衰的故事跨越历史和文化，为古代神话（如 ）和畅销书及电影（如 ）提供了模板。八项研究表明，英雄之旅可以预测并能在因果上增加人们的生活意义体验。我们首先将英雄之旅提炼成七个关键要素——主人公、转变、任务、盟友、挑战、转变和遗产，然后开发了一种新的衡量标准，评估人们生活故事中英雄之旅叙事的感知存在：英雄之旅量表。使用这个量表，我们发现英雄之旅与生活意义之间存在正相关，包括在线参与者（研究 1-2）和社区样本中的老年人（研究 3）。然后，我们开发了一种重新叙事的干预措施，引导人们将生活中的事件视为英雄之旅（研究 4）。这种干预措施通过促使人们反思生活中的重要元素，并将它们连接成一个连贯而引人入胜的叙事，在因果上增加了生活的意义（研究 6）。这种英雄之旅的重新叙事干预措施还增加了人们在模糊语法任务中感知意义的程度（研究 7），并增强了他们对生活挑战的适应能力（研究 8）。这些结果初步证明，像英雄之旅这样的持久文化叙事既反映了有意义的生活，也可以帮助创造有意义的生活。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。
