A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Imagination as a Process-Based Concept

Abstract

The present study explores imagination in a cross-cultural context through an original 25-item questionnaire. A cross-national sample of 940 respondents included 336 participants from North America, 309 from Germany, and 295 from mainland China. Imagination is shown to be a process-based concept consisting of a number of components (factors) rather than a single, reified faculty. A principal component factor analysis yielded a five-factor model including expressive imagination, openness to variations, instrumental imagination, past/future mindedness, and conventionality (in descending order of importance). The central factor, expressive imagination, reflects the intrinsically motivated creation and reception of narratives in everyday life and childhood imaginary worlds. Significant regional differences were found for all five factors. Cultural and social contributors to the study results were discussed.

Neurocognitive patterns dissociating semantic processing from executive control are linked to more detailed off-task mental time travel

“…Our study, therefore, underlines the core role that the way we understand the world around us plays in what we construct using imagination. It is worth noting that that occurrence of imaginative thoughts are common across cultures 43 and have links to both beneficial and detrimental aspects of wellbeing 38 .…”

“…The task switching measure provided two scores (a) flexibility * as the ability to switch from a different condition and (b) inhibition as the ability to suppress information from the previous trial. The calculation of the task switching contrast can be found in the original study 43 . All the semantics related judgement tasks, feature matching task, and the paired-associate task were summarised using efficiency scores.…”

“…* In the original study by Whitmer and colleagues43 , contrast "switch cost", smaller values indicates better ability to switch away from the previous condition. For the ease of interpretation, we reversed the scores and re-named the contrast as "flexibility".…”

Imagination

“…As can be seen from Table 1, some of the imagination instruments have good psychometric properties, although others are missing evaluations of construct validity, including factorial, content, and convergent and/or discriminant validity), thus it is difficult to confirm if they truly measure imagination. For the SIQ (Feng, et al, 2017), the psychometric properties were not reported altogether by test developers.…”

“…For shorter, easy-to-administer self-report measures of imagination and related constructs the following measures should be employed: SIQ (Feng et al, 2017) -the Expressive Imagination subscale is especially relevant, although its use is contingent on future studies' ability to support its reliability and validity); the FQ (Weibel et al, 2018) -both the imaginative and the creative fantasy subscales; the FFIS (Zabelina & Condon, in press) -if the goal is to distinguish between frequency, complexity, emotional valence, and directedness of imagination; and the IBES (von Stumm & Scott, in press) for typical imaginative behaviors.…”