The Seba library treats Meaning Making Activity in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including Thompson, Evan, Singer, Jefferson A., Neimeyer, Robert A).
cognition, in the present context, means the activity of sense-making. Cognition is behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy.
Thompson argues that cognition just is sense-making activity — an autonomous organismic enaction of meaning rather than a property determined from outside the system.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
meaning making was most linked to memories that expressed some form of tension or conflict… for late adolescents, only 23% of memories had meaning making associated with them… this capacity for making integrative meaning of one’s experiences appears to emerge more powerfully in early adulthood.
Singer demonstrates that meaning making activity is developmentally graded, tension-triggered, and differentially distributed across the lifespan in autobiographical memory.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis
the tendency to use integration in both types of memory narratives correlated with stress-related growth. Once again, the ability to see connections and find meaning from traumatic or stressful experiences is associated with personal growth.
Singer shows that integrative meaning making activity — finding connections across difficult experiences — is the specific narrative operation that predicts post-traumatic growth.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis
individuals do not grieve in a vacuum. They make sense of their experience by interacting with others. Furthermore, meanings are critical in understanding family grieving.
Neimeyer and Nadeau argue that meaning making activity in grief is inherently relational and systemic, constructed through social interaction rather than private cognition.
The meanings they attach can be defined as their cognitive representations of reality… a family who construes the loss of a family member as preventable, much of their energy is consumed with how the death should have been prevented.
Neimeyer illustrates that the specific content of meaning making activity in bereavement shapes the entire trajectory of grief work, including where psychic energy is directed.
, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Losssupporting
purposiveness is a constitutive property the whole system possesses because of the way the system is organized… He calls this pattern the twofold pattern of identity and sense-making.
Thompson, following Varela, grounds meaning making activity in the immanent purposiveness of living organisation, making it co-extensive with biological identity itself.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
in meaning-making, 27–28, 607
Ogden’s index explicitly locates the body as a constitutive participant in meaning making, integrating somatic experience into the clinical concept.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
to the degree that the world around us carries our projections, we inhabit our own psyches. No experience of images occurs in a vacuum. What we see is to some degree a function of who we are. Virtually everything carries some kind of meaning.
Ulanov articulates a Jungian projective basis for meaning making activity, locating it in the psyche’s constitutive investment of the world with significance.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting
Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Singer’s reference list signals the Brunerian narrative tradition — particularly the concept of acts of meaning — as a foundational intellectual source for the field’s treatment of meaning making activity.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004aside