National Mentality Reveals Itself in the Perception of Fantasy

For citation: Pronina E.E. (2016) Natsional'naya mental'nost' v zerkale vospriyatiya fentezi [National Mentality Reveals Itself in the Perception of Fantasy]. Mediaskop 3. Available at: http://www.mediascope.ru/node/2167

© Elena E. Pronina
Doctor of Philology, PhD in Psychology, Professor at the Chair of Print Media, Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moscow, Russia), pronina.elena@gmail.com

Abstract

The article examines how people of different nationalities perceive the genre of fantasy. In the research we used the data of the poll conducted worldwide on the audiences of the film-trilogy 'The Hobbit'. The factor analysis of the poll in which respondents from 46 countries took part made it possible to model a semantic space in which a person's capacity to distinguish between fiction and reality as well as his Self and the world could be graded. The position of the respondents in the semantic space corresponds to a certain type of mentality. In the final matrix the description of 16 types of mentality, each determined by the four-dimensional space, has been given. Different national audiences were characterized depending upon their coordinates (position) in the semantic space. The results of the research were interpreted in terms of the general tendencies in the development of the psyche and society.

Keywords: media psychological research, the evolution of the psyche, national mentality, the perception of fantasy.

Notes

Psikhologos. Entsiklopediya prakticheskoy psikhologii [Psychologos. Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology]. Available at: http://www.psychologos.ru/articles/view/proekciya)

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Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar' krylatykh slov i vyrazheniy [Encyclopedic Dictionary of Winged Words and Expressions] (2003)Moscow: «Lokid-Press». Vadim Serov Publ. Available at: http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/dic_wingwords/3342/Если

Tsvetaeva M. (1977) Narod [The People]. In: Krakovskaya A., Rozenblyum Yu. (eds.) Sovetskaya poeziya: v 2 t. Biblioteka vsemirnoy literatury. Seriya tret'ya [Soviet Poetry in 2 values. Library of World Literature. Series no. 3]. Moscow:  Khudozhestvennaya literatura Publ. Available at: http://rupoem.ru/cvetaeva/ego-i-pulya.aspx

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