At the current stage the history of researching creativity appears to have drawn a curve which agrees with the methodological conceptions of L.S. Vigotsky. His idea, that of a psychology which intends to study phenomena in their complexity, should replace the methods of dividing into elementary components (atoms) by methods which single out essential non-elemental units, and should make obvious the logic of understanding creative abilities, as it historically developed in the 19lh and 20lh centuries.
The article describes various studies on awareness - unawareness processes conducted at the department of General psychology at St.-Petersburg State University, Russia. The topic under discussion is the aftereffect of the negative choice, which was discovered by the author. This phenomenon is related to some other well-known psychological phenomena. The article discusses the meaning of this phenomenon (the aftereffect of the negative choice) for the research program in the psychology of consciousness.
The article reveals the subject-matter of the systemacity (consistency) principle in psychology and some forms of its realization. Basic statements of the original version of the system approach by major Russian psychologist and science institutor Boris F. Lomov are considered. The state and the tendencies of development of system approach in the modern period are discussed.
Nourkova Veronika V., Bernstein Daniel M. (2008). Imagination Inflation After a Change in Linguistic Context. Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 1, 197-210
Participants in Experiment 1 completed a 36-item life events inventory (LEI) in their native language (Russian) two separate times, over a 1-week period. Between the two LEIs, participants got 12 items translated from Russian into English and 12 items in Russian. They performed a series of English-language exercises on translated items and Russian-language exercises on non-translated items. After performing exercises on items translated from Russian into English participants increased their confidence that these life events had occurred in their personal past. There was no similar effect for nontranslated items and for control items. Experiment 2 was run to examine if two factors - a change in linguistic context and a change in level of abstraction taken together boosted the effect. Participants completed a 24-item LEI in Russian two separate times, over a 1 -week period. Between the two LEIs, participants got 12 of these life events at the higher level of abstraction (e.g., "Got lost in a shopping mall" or "found yourself at an unfamiliar public place") translated from Russian into English. Participants translated the event from English into Russian and wrote a sentence using the gist of the item. After performing language exercises on items at the higher level of abstraction participants increased their confidence that these life events had occurred in their personal past. The magnitude of effect was almost twice bigger than in Experiment 1. These results indicate that a change in linguistic context can produce imagination inflation. We discuss our findings in terms of familiarity misattribution, whereby processing fluency is experienced as familiarity and misattributed to autobiographical memory.
