Abstract
Welcome to our exciting spring issue for Volume 43, Issue 3. This issue contains articles that deal with constructive political conflict and imagined interactions as well as studies dealing with personality including color, motor imagery, and entity status in mid and late adolescence.
The initial article is by Emily N. Covington-Guillory, Thomas Phillip Madison, and Caryn Winters. This was a narrative analysis of imagined interaction conflict linkage theory which explains how people manage conflict using mental imagery as relive arguments and anticipate future encounters by ruminating about grievances. In this study, subjects were assigned to one of three conditions: positive imagined interactions, negative imagined interactions, and a control condition. Participants engaged in imagined interactions and reflected on reflected on their imagined interactions through open-ended questions before having real conversation on a political topic of their choice with trained confederates. Participants then completed a questionnaire assessing the constructiveness or destructiveness of their interaction.
The results of a thematic analysis revealed that most participants engaged in positive and constructive conflict with their conversation partners. Positive IIs facilitated perspective-taking, while negative IIs allowed individuals to mentally defend their beliefs. It is interesting that their study provided support for Theorem 3 of imagined interaction conflict-linkage theory which suggests that negative intrusive IIs can manifest even when individuals attempt to have positive imagined interactions.
The next three studies deal with effects of personality. The second study is by Catherine Craver-Lemley, Caroline Dillon, Amanda McGraw, and Adam Reeves. They examined synesthetic colors and personality in two studies involving a person who could simultaneously process multiple colors. Their research is the first time that the Big 5 personality profiles has been linked to synesthetic color in the literature. There were interesting findings in terms of openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Moreover, it is intriguing how extraversion was particularly associated with yellow for the case participant, which the authors state is associated with happiness in North America while introversion is associated with blue and reflects sadness. These studies can make you think counterintuitively, about how colors may affect moods.
The third article is by Laura Schmidt, Sophie Schlatter, Ursula Debarnot, Bianca Simonsmeier, and Aymeric Guillot. They examine the Big 5 personality associations with motor imagery. As they note, Motor imagery (MI) training is used to improve motor performance in both patients and athletes. They used the mental chronometry paradigm that captured the temporal components of imagery, as well as self-report measures of imagery vividness and imagery ease. They found especially strong links between extraversion and motor imagery using mental chronometry.
The fourth article is a research note by Mona G. Sayegh and Mayssah El Nayal. They report on HEXACO personality effects in mid to late adolescence. As they report, their research had four objectives: (a) examining the sex-related differences in the level of personality functioning (LOPF), (b) exploring the association between personality traits (PT) and LOPF, (c) exploring the association between identity statuses (IS) and LOPF, (d) exploring whether PT and IS can predict LOPF. It is impressive with a large sample of 1400 students from 15–21 years in Lebanon using the Arabic version of the HEXACO personality inventory. There is an array of findings. For example, honesty, humility, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were negatively associated with low levels of personality functioning in terms of identity and self-direction.
We hope you benefit from these studies. As we always note, we look forward to more intriguing studies and invite you to send your studies in personality and mental imagery to us.