Editor's Statement

2021, Imagination, Cognition and Personality

Editorial Editor’s Statement Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice 2021, Vol. 41(2) 135–136 © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/02762366211043771 journals.sagepub.com/home/ica The second issue of Volume 41 contains ﬁve studies. New research on coping with COVID-19 in terms of mental imagery in the form of imagined interactions. The ﬁrst pair of studies examine imagine interactions with artiﬁcial intelligence in terms of Alexa and using imagined interactions to deal with unemployment and communication apprehension during the time of COVID-19 isolation. The third study examines moral identity and scaling, while the fourth study examines imagery in association with vividness and clarity. The ﬁnal study examines dreams. We brieﬂy highlight each article, in turn. The initial study dealing with imagined interactions is by Tim Gaspard and Phil Madison. They begin by noting how people and agents of artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) interact more frequently than before through voice-powered assistants such as Alexa. AI is treated as human interaction. They examine the use of six functions of imagined interactions (IIs)—rehearsal, self-understanding, relational maintenance, conﬂict linkage, compensation, and catharsis in conjunction with AI talk and actual human-to-human talk. Their implications are intriguing, insofar as humans and machine interactions coevolve in the 21st century. The ensuing study is by Mary Sealy. She investigated a covariate of loneliness, communication apprehension during the COVID-19 pandemic. As she noted, the COVID-19 restrictions restricted movement and physical access, including staying at home and working remotely; the so-called telework. It is interesting that as income increases, the proactivity of imagined interactions decreases during the pandemic coping, and as income increases, so does communication apprehensions regardless of the pandemic, and that those who earn more annually tend to experience higher levels of CA. Participants who identiﬁed themselves as shy, social, reserved, or outgoing, indicated experiencing a greater variety in their IIs, as well as more discrepant IIs. These ﬁndings indicate that, regardless of the social restrictions placed on society, an individual’s drive to be social and outgoing is what may truly impact their IIs and CA. Nonparametric tests resulted in several signiﬁcant ﬁndings between employment status and the frequency, proactivity, variety, self-dominance, compensation, and relational maintenance aspects of IIs. 136 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 41(2) The third report examines moral identity in terms of Pre-Socratic understanding. Six studies were developed by Michail Mantzios. As he notes, the word “Philotimo,” “love for honour,” or a “sense of honour.” There is no scale for measuring this in terms of the commitment to unconditional selﬂess acts that are aligned to a sense of moral identity. The initial study tested, how often people possess the trait while studies two and three tested the reliability of the new measure, and Study 4 tested its stability over time. Study 5 assessed the factor structure and Study 6 validated the scale against other scales. Together these studies propose a reliable and valid measure that is representative of the Greek The fourth study involves vividness, clarity, and control in auditory imagery. It was conducted by Timothy Hubbard and Susan Ruppel. They review how earlier studies of auditory imagery have confounded vividness and clarity. Three scales of auditory imagery were contrasted in order to determine differences in clarity and vividness, and control over auditory imagery was collected. Understanding differences between vividness in auditory imagery and clarity in auditory imagery, and suggestions for potential operational deﬁnitions of auditory vividness and auditory clarity in future studies, are elucidated and intriguing. The ﬁnal study examines the classic continuity hypothesis of dreaming in association with dreaming about our children. It is by the research team of Michael Schredl, Naiara Echevarria, Louise Macary, and Alexandra Weiss. A large sample (N = 1,695) reveals that parents dream about their children a sizable amount of time in terms of their most remembered dreams. For our motivated and curious dream researchers, we do not provide the actual percentage here, so that you can ﬁnd it in the intriguing results. The data is interesting since the emotional tone of dreams about their own children is relatively positive; there is also, a focus on conﬂicts and worries. We hope you enjoy this winter issue and ﬁnd these topics insightful and intriguing as the postpandemic reopening continues. As we continue on during the winter, may we have pleasant imagined interactions, sense of honor, vividness, and dreams; all of which are contained in these studies! James M. Honeycutt, Keith D. Markman, and Amedeo D’Angiulli Co-Editors

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