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In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people (and other living beings) Construals, Understanding, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self.: "Meaning-making, the process of how individuals make sense of knowledge, experience, relationships, and the self, must be considered in designing college curricular environments supportive of learning and development." : Through meaning-making, people are "retaining, reaffirming, revising, or replacing elements of their orienting system to develop more nuanced, complex and useful systems".
The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy,For example: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; especially during Grief in which people attribute some sort of meaning to an experienced death or loss.For example: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; The term is also used in educational psychology.For example: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
In a broader sense, meaning-making is the main research object of semiotics, biosemiotics, and other fields. Social meaning-making is the main research object of social semiotics and related disciplines.: "... the description of a community's communicative practices cannot adequately be accomplished within the confines of any single discipline in the human and social sciences. Such an enterprise is necessarily a transdisciplinary one, drawing on the insights of sociology, ethnology, linguistics, anthropology, social psychology, and so on, in order to develop a unified conceptual framework for talking about social meaning-making (Gumperz 1992)."
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, both of whom were educational critics and promoters of inquiry education, published a chapter called "Meaning Making" in their 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity. In this chapter, they described why they preferred the term "meaning making" to any other metaphors for teaching and learning:
By the end of the 1970s, the term "meaning-making" was used with increasing frequency.As can be seen in a Google Ngram of the term "meaning-making" in Google Ngram Viewer, usage of the term "meaning-making" in the Google Books database jumps just before 1980 and increases thereafter. The term came to be used often in constructivist learning theory which posits that knowledge is something that is actively created by people as they experience new things and integrate new information with their current knowledge. Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan used the term "meaning-making" as a key concept in several widely cited texts on counseling and human development published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.For example: ; ; Kegan wrote: " Human being is meaning making. For the human, what evolving amounts to is the evolving of systems of meaning; the business of organisms is to organize, as Perry (1970) says."; Kegan was referencing The term "meaning-making" has also been used by psychologists influenced by George Kelly's personal construct theory.For example:
In a review of the meaning-making literature published in 2010, psychologist Crystal L. Park noted that there was a rich body of theory on meaning-making, but empirical research had not kept pace with theory development. In 2014, the First Congress on the Construction of Personal Meaning was held as part of the Eighth Biennial International Meaning Conference convened by the International Network on Personal Meaning.
For example, around 1980 psychologist Robert Kegan developed a theoretical framework that posited five levels of meaning-making inspired by Piaget's theory of cognitive development; each level describes a more advanced way of understanding experiences, and people may come to master each level as they develop psychologically. In Kegan's book In Over Our Heads, he applied his theory of meaning-making to the life domains of parenting (families), partnering (couples), working (companies), healing (psychotherapies), and learning (schools).
According to the transformative learning theory that sociologist and educator Jack Mezirow developed in the 1980s and 1990s, adults interpret the meaning of their experiences through a lens of deeply held assumptions.; When they experience something that contradicts or challenges their way of negotiating the world they have to go through the transformative process of evaluating their assumptions and processes of making meaning, which can lead to personal growth and expanded perspectives. Experiences that force individuals to engage in this critical self-reflection, or what Mezirow called "disorienting dilemmas".
In operant (behavioral) psychology, Richard DeGrandpre cited Kegan and showed how the operant conditioning model could be interpreted as a meaning-making process. As traditionally understood in behavioral theory, the stimulus operates control over behavior as that behavior is Reinforcement in the presence of that stimulus. DeGrandpre argued that consequences do not reinforce behavior, per se, but rather shape the meaning of the stimulus conditions in which the behavior occurs. Thus in DeGrandpre's interpretation, much of human meaning is a product of this contingency, where meaningful stimuli come to guide people's behavior, including private emotions, as a result of people's long histories of consequent events. This interpretation is summarized:
Some researchers report that meaning-making can help people feel less distressed, and allows people to become more resilient in the face of loss.For example: ; ; On the converse, failing to attribute meaning to death leads to more long-term distress for some people.
There are various strategies people can utilize for meaning-making; many of them are summarized in the book Techniques of Grief Therapy. One study developed a "Meaning of Loss Codebook" which clusters common meaning-making strategies into 30 categories. Amongst these meaning-making strategies, the most frequently used categories include: personal growth, family bonds, spirituality, valuing life, negative affect, impermanence, lifestyle changes, compassion, and release from suffering.
When family members are able to openly express their attitudes and , it can lead to better well-being and less disagreement in the family. Meaning-making with one's family can also increase marital satisfaction by reducing family tension, especially if the deceased was another family member.
When individuals with a divinity worldview make meaning through spirituality and religiosity, those "individuals perceive the divine to be involved in a major stressful life event" and use the divine to develop a meaning for the loss. There are three main ways in which a theistic individual may create meaning through religion, all of which contribute to how the griever may create meaning of their loss:
Another meaning-making strategy people use is to create meaning by valuing their own life. People who create meaning in this way may try to cherish the life they have, try to find their purpose, or change their lifestyles.
A cancer diagnosis can also cause caregivers to question the meaning of the experience or life in general. The caregiving role can be very demanding—both physically and emotionally—as caregivers are expected to manage pain, medications, and activities of daily living all while contending with their own fears, anxiety, and grief. At the same time, many loved ones find the act of caregiving to be meaningful itself, as it leads to connection, purpose, and growth. Interventions such as (MCP-C) and (EBT) are evidence-based treatments that help caregivers manage their own distress while finding meaning and purpose in the experience.
For cancer patients themselves, various psychosocial interventions targeting meaning-making have been found to be effective. Dignity therapy, meaning-centered psychotherapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy have all shown promise. A 2019 meta-analysis that included 29 randomized controlled trials found that psychosocial interventions targeting meaning and purpose produced small to medium sized improvements in these domains.
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