Moments of Affective Insight: Their Phenomenology and Relations to Selected Individual Differences

Abstract

Affective insight was defined as a subjective event occurring during intensive self-reflection. To study affective insight, seventy-nine individuals were presented instructions designed to encourage intensive self-reflection. Subsequently, they completed an open-ended questionnaire and a seventy-two-item true-false questionnaire describing their experience during self-reflection. Q-type factor analysis of the seventy-two-item questionnaire revealed four different types of reactions during the instructions: underdistancing, overdistancing, intellectual self-control, and apprehensive insight. An eight-item Affective Insight Scale (AIS) was developed which was independent of social desirability, which differentiated these four groups of participants, and which correlated positively with a judge's ratings of affective insight as indicated in responses to the open-ended questionnaire. Using the AIS, there was support for the hypothesis that affective insight is associated with imagery involvement, as measured by the Creative Imagination Scale, the Absorption Scale, and Rorschach M responses. There was also some support for the hypothesis that affective insight is associated with a preference for novel imagery, as measured by the Barron-Welsch Art Scale. Other trait measures predicted reactions which were conceptually and empirically independent of affective insight (e.g., intellectual self-control), indicating the importance of simultaneously studying different reactions during intensive self-reflection.