Meaning-making

People are inveterate meaning-makers, not merely to make sense of things to adapt and survive, but to animate their lives with purpose. Constructionists hold that meanings are not found outside of or external to language. That is, meaning is not discretely located within intrapsychic processes or deep linguistic structures, nor is there universal meaning to be discovered, but rather meanings are invented interactionally and are dependant, in part, on language. According to Heath:
:The search for meaning is directly related to our ability to use language in a question-posing way… The human mind seems to be incorrigibly curious about events, origins, causality, prediction and control. A need to know. And, of course, the search for and creation of meaning. It is almost as if the human brain/mind is constructed as an epistemological, meaning creating organism. ‘Why is there anything and why are we here?’ are not questions caused by genetics, but result from culture, language and existential anxiety.
Research on language and mind, learning and teaching, mindfulness, metacognition, place and social space, mental health literacy, resilience, the social construction of health and various constructs associated with positive psychology has reconfigured the constellation of key mental health variables, placing meaning-making at its center. Researchers have been particularly interested in the effects of meaning-making on adjustment to stressful life events. Multiple theories have been advanced from varying perspectives including those that emphasize cognitive processes and underlying structures, the role of autobiographical memory and allied concepts such as internal state language, and the influence on and of personal narratives.
Park and Folkman developed an integrated model of meaning-making in the context of stressful life events that distinguishes meaning-making efforts from meanings made and situational meaning from global meaning. The Park and Folkman model, subsequently refined by Park, is based on a set of tenets drawn from the major relevant theories. These tenets are summarized as follows: people develop cognitive frameworks (global meaning) with which to interpret their experiences; when confronted with a stressful event individuals assess the situation and assign meaning to it; distress arises in proportion to the degree of discrepancy between situational meaning and global meaning; the distress caused by discrepancy initiates a process of meaning-making intended to reduce the discrepancy and restore a sense of coherence and valued purpose; and when successful, this process facilitates adjustment to the stressful event.
Park’s model is consistent with Antonovsky’s claim that it is not life’s stressors that cause distress but whether such stressors violate one’s sense of coherence. Antonovsky’s salutogenic theory infers that the basic objectives of meaning-making are to preserve or recover a sense of coherence and to develop and nurture a life of purpose. This involves assigning meanings to events that may expand or modify but ultimately cohere with one’s global meaning while permitting the construction of a narrative that is purposeful and self-defined
According to the Park-Folkman model, individuals continue their efforts at meaning-making when their initial attempts are unsuccessful. Michael and Snyder suggest that individuals’ unsuccessful attempts at meaning-making are akin to rumination and distress. This phenomenon is conceptualized in Kusan’s study on the ontogeny and deployment of mental health literacy(MHL) as inverted synergy which emphasizes the process rather than content aspects of the rumination study participants engaged in following a dissonance evoking event. All of the participants in the study described experiencing at least one episode in which their thoughts became increasingly convoluted with a corresponding increase in the intensity of distress. The episodes described by the participants involved non-clinical obsession; however, there are undoubtedly examples within the general population of uncurbed inverted synergy eventually surpassing a clinical threshold. Episodic inverted synergy does not imply organic impairment, nor is it an inevitable response to an unwelcome event. It may, however, suggest naivety regarding present dynamics and/or the absence of cognitive strategies for their correction. In other words, inverted synergy may be at least partially explained by a lack of previous successful experience with situations similar to the present challenge and by the absence of the knowledge potentially obtained therein. Put yet another way, people think what they think in the absence of a better alternative.
Beyond describing the dynamics of episodic escalation of counterproductive thoughts and dysregulated emotions, inverted synergy may also be a useful descriptor for the serial compounding of problematically assigned meanings over time. Each meaning made borrows from and confirms or revises one’s global meaning (the aggregation of all previously made meanings), consolidating or recalibrating the global cognitive-emotional frame from which new meanings are made. At any point in the evolution of one’s personal narrative the consolidated aggregation of meanings comprise a guidepost for decisions to be taken. For individuals drawing upon impoverished or otherwise problematic literacies the likelihood of ineffectual and/or counterproductive mental health decision-making is undoubtedly increased, as is the likelihood of establishing a trajectory of mental health decision-making that is characterized by inverted synergy.
In rudimentary terms, meaning construction involves the attempt to cohere sensory information with established neurobiological networks and the global cognitive framework (global meaning). Meaning-making occurs, then, at the interface of intra-subject processes and the culturally coded object world. Data from the Kusan study suggests that the locally coded object world has a profound impact on the individual’s construction of meanings. The study participants indicated that knowledge obtained in their immediate social orbit was likely to have greater resonance than knowledge obtained from afar. The data also suggests that global literacies permeate local culture through local filters, abetted by the individuals’ desire to be valued and accepted by family, peers and the community.
Russian philologist, Bakhtin, used the term “chronotope” to depict the spatio-temporal matrix that governs linguistic acts, which are the construction blocks of personal and community narratives. Paraphrasing Bakhtin, Basso described chronotopes as “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse… as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves”. Participants in the Kusan study consistently described northern Ontario as a distinct geo-cultural entity whose essential character derives from the unique combination of prominent features of the natural, built and social environments.Participants commonly referred to “touchstones” (typically symbolic features of the local physical environment) as a type of knowledge they repeatedly draw upon to manage their mental health. These findings are consistent with previous research that identifies place and social space as among the key determinants of mental health.
Regardless of its origin, the information that individuals assimilate is invariably vetted through behavioural experimentation, and metacognitive practices such introspection and evaluative self-talk. Metacognition has been implicated as being integral to the processing of information at the interface where biological and cultural grammars are conjoined. Metacognitive knowledge refers to beliefs and literacy about the workings and limits of cognitive enterprise. Knowledge of the factors that affect the course and outcome of cognitive enterprise undoubtedly qualifies as a fundamental example of MHL— one which has a profound influence on the acquisition and deployment of other mental health literacies individuals employ. Individuals with even basic literacy regarding their own cognitive processes (whether formal or self-constructed) are able to use this knowledge for self-regulation and to exert control over the environment.
Anderson and Goolishian define the therapeutic system as being essentially a linguistic system in which participants negotiate meanings and understandings through language. Kusan refers to the individual’s production and translation of knowledge for adaptation, self-regulatory and communication purposes as autologous knowledge-translation (AKT), at the core of which is the process of meaning-making. AKT is initiated by cultured resonance which both permits and results from meanings assigned to sensory information that resonate with the individual’s global cognitive framework (the aggregation of meanings previously assigned). AKT, cultured resonance and meaning-making involve neurobiological and cognitive processes.
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