437 research outputs found
Emotional Processes in Elaborating a Historical Trauma in the Daily Press
Twentieth century has witnessed several cases of mass traumatization when groups as
wholes were ostracized even threated with annihilation. From the perspectives of identity
trauma, when harms are afflicted to a group of people by other groups because of their
categorical membership, ethnic and national traumas stand out. This paper aims to
investigate long-term consequences of permanent traumatization on national identity
with presenting a narrative social psychological study as a potential way of empirical
exploration of the processes of collective traumatization and trauma elaboration. A
Narrative Trauma Elaboration Model has been introduced which identifies linguistic
markers of the elaboration process. Newspaper articles (word count = 203172) about a
significant national trauma of the Hungarian history, Treaty of Trianon (1920), were chosen
from a ninety year time span and emotional expressions of narratives were analysed with
a narrative categorical content analytic tool (NarrCat). Longitudinal pattern of data show
very weak emotional processing of the traumatic event. Results are discussed in terms
of collective victimhood as core element of national identity and its effects on trauma
elaboration
- …