Story | A Conversation with Angus Fletcher, PhD

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Story | A Conversation with Angus Fletcher, PhD

It’s not every day you get to speak with the theorists and thought leaders who have been among the most influential in your work. But this summer, I had that distinct pleasure. Twice! 

In one of the most enjoyable conversations I’ve had, I spoke with Professor of Story Science at Ohio State University, Angus Fletcher, PhD. To kick off this fall’s issue of MAPP Magazine, we’re pleased to share this conversation. In it, Angus and I discussed his own story; where artificial intelligence will always fall short of narrative intelligence; and how we can apply the science of story not only to think, work, and communicate better, but also to live better and richer lives.

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A Good Story

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Jackie was born in Big Bear Valley and remained a permanent resident her entire life. She met her first love there; his name was Mr. B. Early in their relationship, a persistent younger suitor named Shadow charmed his way into Jackie’s heart. Jackie was reluctant at first, but soon she became defenseless against Shadow’s steady attention, thoughtful gifts, and clear desire to build a forever together.

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Inheriting Collective Stories

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Inheriting Collective Stories

I come from a people who love to tell long, delicious stories. We gather around tables overflowing with stuffed cabbages and neatly wrapped grape leaves, and talk for so many hours that we return home with hoarse voices begging for hydration. As a child (and now adult) of the Armenian diaspora, I became fascinated by the stories that my family introduced into every banal moment, the narrative version of injecting small doses of meaning throughout the day. A breakfast recipe became a reminder of how my grandfather liked his omelets (drizzled with honey, apparently), and a vase embellished with red carnations turned into a discussion on Armenian death rituals.

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Narrative Identity, Generativity, and a President’s Psychobiography: A Conversation with Dan McAdams, PhD

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Narrative Identity, Generativity, and a President’s Psychobiography: A Conversation with Dan McAdams, PhD

Storytelling has been around a while. Long before your parents, your grandparents, or their grandparents’ great-grandparents, parts of your own story have not only been told, they’ve likely influenced life as you’ve known it. And as you’ve read in this issue of MAPP Magazine, the stories we tell—and think—can also quite powerfully inform how we see and experience ourselves and what’s possible. Among the pioneering, most prolific, and most influential scholars to research these ideas—of life as story and identity as narrative—is Dan P. McAdams, PhD. To close this issue of MAPP Magazine, please enjoy our fascinating conversation with him. 

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In Memoriam: Isaac Prilleltensky, PhD and Ora Prilleltensky, PhD

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In Memoriam: Isaac Prilleltensky, PhD and Ora Prilleltensky, PhD

For many of us who came through the MAPP program, the pull of Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky’s work was immediate. He gave us the word mattering, but it was not only the power of his ideas that drew us to him. It was the conviction and humility with which he delivered them, the questions he asked, his clever use of humor, and the unmistakable sense that his scholarship reflected how he actually lived.

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Play: A Serious Tool for Transition

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Play: A Serious Tool for Transition

There’s a peculiar kind of panic that arrives in adulthood when life stops making sense in the neat, linear way we were promised it would. You know the feeling. Your boss retires. Your industry shifts. Your marriage changes. Your children leave home. You lose your job. Or perhaps nothing catastrophic happens at all. You simply wake up one Tuesday morning, stare into your coffee, and realize the life you carefully built no longer fits. 

If that’s you, you are probably not sitting on a swing smiling at—who is she smiling at?—while you journal your dreams for the next phase of your life. And the idea of play feels as useful as being told to "follow your passion" by someone with a trust fund.

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Psychotherapy Doesn’t (Always) Have to be Pserious

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Psychotherapy Doesn’t (Always) Have to be Pserious

After a recent Zoom workshop featuring several MAPPsters, that is, alumni of Penn’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, I was asked to write this piece due to my being an addiction counselor and my “strengths of humor and playfulness.” I quickly said yes, a habit I’m trying to break, because it felt good to be asked. I briefly regretted saying yes when the guidelines were sent because they stipulated APA citations and references, which made me wish I had a pricing structure that said I’ll write anything for free unless it requires APA—in which case I charge $250,000.

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Let’s Play! A Conversation with Stuart Brown, MD

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Let’s Play! A Conversation with Stuart Brown, MD

When we think about play, many of us may think of childhood—of running around a playground, of a backyard sprinkler in the summertime, of toy trains and made-up stories of adventure. Few of us may even consider play’s pertinence in adulthood, but research indicates that play is not just a hallmark of childhood. It’s a necessity for well-being throughout our lives.

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The Autonomy of the Heart

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The Autonomy of the Heart

Western culture has been running a masterclass in romantic passivity for roughly five centuries. The idiom ‘falling in love’ is charming, ancient, and almost certainly making you worse at it. It traces its passive roots to at least the sixteenth century, though the underlying logic is considerably older. Medieval Europeans were helplessly fatalistic about most things—plagues, harvests, the general capriciousness of God, and love was no exception. Fortune's Wheel, that great spinning metaphor borrowed cheerfully from the Roman goddess Fortuna, captured the essential worldview: You do not steer; you are turned. You do not choose your position on the wheel; you simply hold on and hope the spin is kind. Love, in this cosmology, was something that happened to you in the same category as the weather, taxation, your next meal, or even the Black Death.

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How to Feel Loved: A conversation with Harry Reis, PhD

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How to Feel Loved: A conversation with Harry Reis, PhD

What is love? And what’s its role in the good life? Alongside three MAPP alumni authors and two subject matter experts, we invite you to join us as we unpack the poetry and practice of choosing, sharing, and feeling love. In this issue, we explore the power of its presence, the impact of its absence, and the multitudes of its expressions. How love can light the way when we’ve lost ourselves. And how we can find ourselves—even when we’ve lost love.   

To begin, we spoke with co-author of the recently released book, How to Feel Loved, relationship researcher and teacher, Harry Reis, PhD.

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After Love: The Science and Sorrow of Letting Go

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After Love: The Science and Sorrow of Letting Go

For someone who has been in love with love throughout life, it surprised me that I never truly got into bed with heartbreak, not in the way it slides into your ribs uninvited and refuses to leave. I believed I had felt it before. It is clear now that I had only flirted with it. Heartbreak arrived not as betrayal or verdict, but as raw intimacy followed by the unbearable absence of it. No villains. No dramatic exit. Just the merciless unmaking of everything that had already begun to feel like home. So I did what any reasonably undone person does: I pulled up a chair and let it have me. Not to romanticize the pain. Not to justify it. But to understand it. To come out alive.

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Love as a Healing Force

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Love as a Healing Force

That morning, when I opened my eyes, my body was no longer mine. It was as if I had lost the last bit of control over it. My limbs and my head felt incredibly heavy. I told my husband, “I don’t think I can work today,” with tears streaming down my face. I asked for sick leave. After sleeping for hours, I finally gained the strength to get out of bed. I tried to walk to the bathroom and found that I needed to lean against the wall, taking slow, careful steps just to get there. Little did I know that this would be my reality for the next few months.

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Making Love Legible: A conversation with Jacqueline Mattis, PhD

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Making Love Legible: A conversation with Jacqueline Mattis, PhD

As Zerish Mattis-Easton taught her daughter, love lives in the spaces we hold and the stories we tell. It lives in our labor and the hours between shifts. It lives in a pot of soup for a neighbor who needs it, in the questions we ask, and the grace that we give. Love is catalytic and transformative. It’s transcendent.

Anyone who has spent time with her can attest, Zerish’s daughter Jacqueline Mattis, PhD embodies both the expansiveness and everydayness of love. And in a field that has largely overlooked love in urban contexts, Jacquie Mattis is helping to make love legible. To close this issue on the science of love, we’re pleased to share our conversation.

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Grief Does Not Need a Pep Talk; It Needs Presence

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Grief Does Not Need a Pep Talk; It Needs Presence

Grief is a universal experience. At some point, each of us will grieve a loss, not only the loss of a loved one, but likely the loss of relationships, identity, health, home, imagined futures, or the worlds we thought we were living in. And yet, Western culture remains profoundly ill-equipped to hold grief, especially when the loss is traumatic or out of order.

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Yes, and Yet: When Joy and Loss Learn to Cohabitate

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Yes, and Yet: When Joy and Loss Learn to Cohabitate

On January 5, 2012, I sustained a spinal cord injury. In a matter of seconds, I lost the ability to control my legs with my brain—a traumatic loss that made me struggle for years. The loss of our bodies and the way they have always worked is comparable to the loss of an intimate partner, as we are changed forever (Clifton, 2014).

And yet, if you ask me, I live a pretty good life.

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Always November: A Conversation with Arik Housley

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In this issue of MAPP Magazine, we sought to explore where positive psychology sits beside suffering. To make space at the holiday table for both celebration and lament. When you’ve lost a child or the use of your legs. . . When you’re facing a life-altering diagnosis or life-shattering heartbreak. . . When you’ve lost your way, can barely breathe, and well-meant platitudes and pep talks not only fall short but intensify your pain. . . what then? What does the best in us look like when we’re navigating the worst?

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Running on Half Power: Why Women Burnout and How to Reclaim Alignment

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Running on Half Power: Why Women Burnout and How to Reclaim Alignment

Imagine running a power plant at full capacity, day after day, no time for maintenance, no pause to refuel. The lights might stay on for a while, but eventually, even the most resilient system begins to dim. The same is true for women today. Across industries and roles, women are often the central source of energy that keeps families, teams, and communities running. Yet the systems around them rarely replenish what they take.

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She Needs R.E.S.T.: A New Playbook for Women’s Well-Being in the Age of Overwhelm

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She Needs R.E.S.T.: A New Playbook for Women’s Well-Being in the Age of Overwhelm

Women of my generation, Xennials, a micro-generation typically defined by birth years from approximately 1977 to 1983, were lied to at a very young age when we were promised that we could “have it all.” However, the data and many of our lived experiences tell a more complicated story. In 2025, signs of strain are flashing red: Women’s labor-force gains have slowed or reversed in key pockets, Black women’s unemployment has jumped, and the rollback of flexible work is squeezing caregivers hardest (Carrazana, 2025; Popera, 2025).

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The True Cost of Female Entrepreneurship: How Female Founders can Flourish in a System not Built for Them

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The True Cost of Female Entrepreneurship: How Female Founders can Flourish in a System not Built for Them

Entrepreneurship has often been described as an extreme sport, a psychologically demanding pursuit requiring endurance, courage, and recovery much like that of elite athletes (Chamorro-Premuzic & Wade, 2020). Yet for women, the climb is often steeper. Beneath the familiar headlines about funding gaps lies a quieter story—one about the psychological and emotional cost of building a business in an ecosystem that wasn’t designed with women in mind.

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Financial Thriving: A Positive Pathway for Women’s Financial Well-Being

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Financial Thriving: A Positive Pathway for Women’s Financial Well-Being

A historic transfer of wealth is underway, positioning women in a larger role within the global financial system and expanding their influence. Within the next decade, women are expected to control $34 trillion in investable assets, up from roughly $18 trillion in 2023 (Catania & Zucker, 2025). This shift has profound implications that extend well beyond the balance sheet, creating an opportunity to reconsider how changing our view of financial well-being can empower women and enhance their overall well-being.

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