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Chapter 15 - Narratives, Perspective-Taking, and Emotion Regulation

Obstacles and Boosters to Cope with Child Maltreatment

from Part III - How Deviating Autobiographical Memories Shape the Life Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2025

Christin Camia
Affiliation:
Zayed University Abu Dhabi
Annette Bohn
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
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Summary

The extent to which people succeed in integrating several perspectives in their narratives of an emotionally charged event suggests how well the narrator has coped with it. Through temporal and social perspective taking, narratives promote emotion regulation and help making sense of experience. The present work will discuss the close entanglement of emotion regulation, perspective taking, and narrative. First, we will discuss how adverse childhood experiences and interpersonal potentially traumatic experiences during childhood harm the development of emotion regulation and perspective taking skills. Second, we will highlight how this reflects in emotion and trauma narratives of children and adults who have gone through child maltreatment. Finally, we will argue that narratives not only reflect the extent to which a person copes with the event narrated but also promote coping itself, by restructuring the autobiographical memory due to perspective taking and emotion regulation in an interpersonal elicitation context.

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Autobiographical Memory and the Life Story
New Perspectives on Narrative Identity
, pp. 332 - 348
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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