Mental Imagery

The current book presents select proceedings from the Eleventh Annual Conference of AASMI (The American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery) in Washington, DC, 1989, and from the Twelfth Annual Conference of AASMI in Lowell and Boston, MA, 1990. This presentation of keynote addresses, research papers, and clinical workshops reflects a broad range of theoretical positions and a diverse repertoire of methodological approaches. Within this breadth and diversity, however, four aspects of the nature of imagery stand out: its mental nature, its private nature, its conscious nature, and its symbolic nature. The mental nature of imagery--i.e., its epistemological aspect--is explored in the book's first section of articles by Marcia Johnson, Laura Snodgrass, Leonard Giambra and Alicia Grodsky, Vija Lusebrink, Selina Kassels, Helane Rosenberg and Yakov Epstein, M. Elizabeth D'Zamko and Lynne Schwab, and Laurence Martel. These first eight articles fall, essentially, into various domains of cognitive psychology, including the psychology of art and educational psychology. In the second section, the private nature of imagery is studied by Ernest Hartmann, Nicholas Spanos, Benjamin Wallace, Deirdre Barrett, John Connolly, James Honeycutt, Dominique Gendrin, and James Honeycutt and J. Michael Gotcher. These studies, which fall within the realm of personality and social psychology, bring to light the fact that many very public interpersonal behaviors reflect very private images. Such behaviors range from interpersonal rapport with a hypnotist, to rapport with a forensic jury.