Mindy Krakow’s excellent dissertation research on death narratives was recently published in Health Psychology.

This research is part of a larger program that seeks to systematically investigate and compare stories where characters live (survivor narratives) or die (death narratives). We start with the assumption that both nareative forms can exert influence; the question is when does each loom larger and what features magnify this effect?
To date, we have studied death/survivor narratives in the context of cervical and skin cancer. We plan to expand this research to other illnesses/threats and to continue exploring underlying theoretical mechanisms.