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Closure Through an Ontological Lens

Noor M. Al-Khaouli, Keilai Angeldekao, and Rachel A. Mavrovich

SUNY at Buffalo, USA /

National Centre for Ontological Research, USA

FOIS/JOWO - 2025

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Introduction

Increasing global aging → higher need to understand successful aging.
Narrative identity → as framework for studying well-being.
Closure is an important yet under-explored narrative theme.
Applied ontology → used to formalise data sets

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Narrative Identity Framework

Narrative Identity: The story one tells about their life to make sense of who they are and who they are becoming. The story is always evolving to integrate the past, present and future (McAdams, 2011)

Theme: Recurring patterns that emerge from the narrative and reflect the broader conceptual meaning of the life story.

For example, one day I get into an accident. Someone almost runs me over. Both me and the driver are pissed, He claims I walked in front of him without notice and I claim that he was in the wrong for driving so fast. I might go the rest of my life thinking I was in the right, and that I almost died from someone else mistake. I might get nightmares of my near death experience, I might hate Renault drivers. Whether or not this experience that is built upon other experiences positively or negatively effects my engagement with the world around me, it nevertheless informs that engagement and the construction of my sense of self. This evolution of personality is what narrative identity researchers study. What is important to know that in order to try and preserve the phenomenological underpinnings Narrative Identity researcher perform something called coding on narrative resources. I am not an expert, but from what I understand its labelling and categorising certain themes that show up in the narrative resource of a subject.

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Self-Transcendence

The experience of feeling connected to something greater than oneself (Reischer et al., 2021)

Transcendence as a phenomenon heavily interacts with other phenomena of interest, such as closure, solitude and well-being.

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Closure as a Narrative Theme

Closure is one of the themes that emerge in the narratives of highly self transcendent individuals and it is the extent to which the narrator has overcome past regrets (Reischer et al., 2021)

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Relevance of Closure

Projects such as the NIH funded PHASES tackle psychological constructs that incorporate “closure”.

- Closure is not as explored as other themes

- Representing an integral theme like closure will help us in structuring the psychological constructs that build off each other.

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The Goal

Clarifying and disambiguating Narrative Identity Research for the purpose of furthering collective understanding of personality development.

We start by analyzing specific themes from the scientific literature which will be found in relevant datasets.

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Leveraging Applied Ontology

We adopted the Basic Formal Ontology to use dispositions to characterize certain mental states, in particular, ‘Narrative Closure’, and ‘Regretful Sentiment’.

Dispositions are subclasses of realizable entities, where it functions as a part of a continuant, for our purpose the Narrative Agent.

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Impact

We plan to adopt the formal structures highlighted in the previous slide to analyze and connect siloed research efforts in the aging domain.

Identifying and disambiguating what events are effectively instances of closure will help in formalising the Narrative Identity domain.

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rmavrovi@buffalo.edu

Thank you!

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Supplemental Slides

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Thematic Analysis

Themes are not identified in the data, they are created based on the researcher’s personal interpretation

Reflection helps ensure that the findings consider both the participants’ responses and the larger context, such as social cultural factors

For our case, closure is already an established theme and therefore the coding process is skipped.

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1.Familiarize oneself with the data (reading transcripts)

2.Generate initial codes (open coding, or “labelling”)

3.Search for themes (categorizing)

4.Review themes (collapse codes into themes)

5.Define and name themes (reviewing and refining themes)

6.Producing the report