Abstract
Editors Statement:
Welcome to the spring issue (Volume 44, No. 3) of Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. We hope you had a nice winter with climate changes. This issue contains intriguing articles dealing with the extraversion and pain management, eye size and attraction via face dissatisfaction, soothing media effects on mental imagery, nightmare propensity, and a commentary on hating outgroups in terms of storytelling.
The initial study is by Khwaish Vasnani, Reina Baguio, Reuel Catingub, and Catingub Yap. They examine mental health in terms of pain tolerance. They discuss how psychological and genetic factors, time passage affect mental anguish and exclusively examine the effects of extraversion on pain tolerance. They had a large sample of over 670 using mediation analysis and found interesting results including how extraversion helps with pain management due to social support compared to introversion.
The second study is by Izumi Ayase, Masaki Mori, and Takaaki Kato. They examine the effects of eye size on attractiveness on the degree of facial dissatisfaction. They discuss how large eyes are often viewed as more attractive while people with high levels of facial dissatisfaction similarly assess. A sample completed the Face Dissatisfaction Scale and rated the attractiveness of self-face and other-face photos with 11 different eye magnifications. The results reveal that individuals with a high degree of self-face dissatisfaction perceive faces with larger eyes as more attractive than individuals with a low degree of self-face dissatisfaction. What is particularly intriguing is their speculation about how using eye makeup may affect eye size judgment on the presumption that eye makeup may be used to bring one’s eyes closer to the eye size that is perceived as attractive. attractiveness of one’s face is altered by eye makeup. The cosmetic industry will be interested in their results.
The third study is conducted by Catarina Gouveia Gaglianone, Lian Zhu, Karri Gillespie-Smith, and Matthias Schwannauer. They examine how positive mental imagery positive mental imagery is believed to counteract the negative effects of anxiety and depression. Yet, this is often hard to do because there is a regression to negative imagery. They examine the influence of soothing environments on positive mental health. Examines of soothing environments are nature scenes such as water, sky, landscapes, animals, trees. Showing natural scenes can result in accessing positive episodic memories. It is interesting that while content of prospective mental imagery in individuals often involved visualizing one's milestones, the importance of family, motivation to carry on, and travel; it also was a source of stress, anxiety, and disappointment (discontent between their present and future selves).
The fourth study examines the causes of nightmare proneness. It is conducted by William Kelly. It is interesting how nightmares are experience by 4% of the population on a weekly basis and associated with cognitive and emotional dysfunction, suicidality, and distress. Participants completed measures of nightmare proneness, frequency, attachment, trauma, behavioral inhabitation/activation, arousability, executive functioning, and mental health concerns. It is interesting how stepwise regression analysis reveals that behavioral inhabitation, avoidant attachment, and trauma were the were predictors of nightmare proneness. Their findings suggest that nightmares help to process and integrate negative emotions which may be unacknowledged or repressed in waking life.
The last paper is a combined study and commentary by Anna Abraham. She discusses ingroup and outgroup identification in terms of vitriol toward outgroups. The BLINCS model is based on the idea that people can tell apart what is real from what is fiction because of the “inherent features of fictional narratives, namely that they are bounded (B), inference-light (LIN), curated (C), and sparse (S). Boundedness refers to the property of limits or confines in the number and expanse of informational elements available within a story.
She provides intriguing examples of presidential elections in which “the introduction of a presidential candidate to the race who was previously unknown adds an enormous expanse of pertinent information to the narrative of individual social reality. Every piece of information we learn about the new person helps us build a picture of the candidate, and the details of that person’s life story make it possible to link what we newly learn with other related information we already know. We also immediately tie the information about the new candidate to the information we have about the existing candidates. Emotionally-valenced and preference-based associations are also formed in relation to this ever-unfolding story that we develop about this person. We have a sense of whether we like them or find them attractive, and we know whether or not this opinion is shared by other meaningful entities, such as our families or friends, within our own social reality.”
This article is very helpful in understanding hate generation in relation to stereotyping derived from fictional narratives. Abraham discusses how in daily life, there may be voluminous discussion about political differences with politically like-minded others while our ingroup perspectives are regarded to be more moderate or mainstream, while those of the outgroup are seen as more extremist and even potentially dangerous in terms of a self-giving, cognitive biases
We hope you enjoy these studies and encourage you to submit your research on cognition, personality and imagination to us. Similar to the article commentary in this issue, we are pleased to announce that we are soliciting for future issues; brief submissions dealing with theory, perspectives, opinion pieces, and “hypothesis papers” that are short and to the point and written for broad audiences.
Contact the editorial board if you have suggestions for special issues on associated research in imagery, neuroscience, or emotional processing.