Abstract
Welcome to the summer issue (Volume 44, No. 4) of Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. We have exciting articles dealing with imagery ability to deal with stress, as well as creative thinking and probabilities, theories of consciousness, and research notes examining nightmare distress and spatial imagery.
The first article is by Charlie Mathieson, Annie Ginty, and Sarah Williams. They examine the use of jmagery in terms of layered response training to deal with stress. They discuss how long-term exposure to stress is associated with various diseases including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and Alzheimer's including mental health conditions such as disordered eating, substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Their research identifies the correlations of stress and develops accessible and cost-effective interventions to reduce the damaging consequences of stress.
They conducted two studies in a non-athlete and athlete samples, respectively. The first study with a sample of over 200 adults examined the association between mastery and affect imagery ability with stress appraisals and perceived stress. The second study examined the feasibility and acceptability of a two-week layered stimulus response training (LSRT) to increase imagery ability, reduce stress, and elicit adaptive stress appraisals. In both studies, mastery and affect imagery ability were positively associated with challenge and negatively associated with threat appraisals and perceived stress. Their results suggest LSRT could be effective for regulating stress in young adults.
The second study is by Boris Forthmann, Selina Weiss, and Benjamin Goecke. They discuss how chance models of creativity suggest that generating more ideas increases the likelihood of generating a high-quality idea and have been applied to scientific productivity, brainstorming, music, and divergent thinking. Using two large datasets, they extend previous work on the equal odds baseline (i.e., a chance model of creativity) by using a latent variable analytic approach to model latent residual factors rectified for fluency. Using structural equation modeling they compared three measurement models: the equal odds baseline latent variable model, a residualized model, and a ratio score model in conjunction with cognitive abilities (i.e., fluid intelligence and working memory capacity). The results are intriguing including the discovery that when a chance model of creativity is used, a cognitive interpretation using working memory is applicable. Their analysis illuminated discussions about the compatibility of chance models with cognitive explanations of creative cognition.
The third paper is a review by Amedeo D’Angiulli and Kiranpreet Sidhu. They discuss theories of consciousness, evolutionary neuroscience, reductionism, and functionalism. It is interesting how in psychology, cognitive and neuroscience, it can be difficult to justify one theoretical approach over another. They unify various theories through a framework called, “functionalist emergent materialism (FEM) developed over a period of 15 years through teaching 2000 students. They discuss Damasio's tripartite of consciousness in terms of a test for recognizing an organism's consciousness. Their table of consciousness definitions is an excellent summary including the theories from where they originated (e.g., emergentism, functionalism, global workspace theory, integrated information theory, reductionism, quantum theories).
They present a quick tutorial on the epistemology of consciousness including philosophy and scientific theory. Their discussion of the “Kanizsa triangle” is intriguing in explaining how emergentism functions within theories of consciousness. They discuss how the framework of Functional Emergent Materialism offers a comprehensive approach for addressing the complexities and theoretical discrepancies within the neuroscience of consciousness. FEM provides a conceptual tool for understanding which assumptions are made in the study of consciousness and how it aligns with evolutionary theory while addressing the “hard problem” of consciousness more successfully.
The final set of papers are research notes dealing with nightmares and spatial imagery, respectively. The fourth paper is by Michael Schredl and Julia Wiesenthal. They examine distress about nightmares in terms of personality correlates. This is a research note in which they replicate associations between gender, neuroticism, beliefs about nightmares, nightmare frequency, and nightmare distress in a sample of over 410 subjects. They report how beliefs about nightmares is associated with neuroticism. It is interesting how women tend to report higher nightmare distress than men even though nightmare frequency, neuroticism, and beliefs about nightmares are statistically controlled.
The fifth paper is by Diego Campos-Juanatey and Alfredo Campos. They discuss how studies in psychology and neuroscience report that indicate that mental images are not a unitary whole. Instead, there are objects and spatial images. Object images refer to those images that focus on shape, color, and size while spatial images refer to relationships between objects, moving objects, and spatial transformations. They sample over 200 subjects who were asked to form mental spatial images, mentally rotate images, and to move on maps. Intriguing results reveal that those high in spatial imagery and people high in mental rotation had more hits and more hits minus errors in the task of orienting themselves on urban maps than participants low in spatial imagery and those low in mental rotation.
As usual, we hope you enjoy these studies and encourage you to submit your research on cognition, personality and imagination to us. Additionally, we are soliciting 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.