O processo criativo na reflexão contrafactual: fantasiando mundos alternativos

Abstract

Creative action combines multiple factors, including cognitive processes and socio-emotional variables. Guilford theorized some factors that were later associated with the creative person, namely: fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality. On the other hand, when imaginative thinking goes into the past and digresses hypothetical alternatives to events and their outcomes, we call it counterfactual. There are four axes of classification of counterfactual thinking: related to direction, structure, referential and function. But the alternative reality to the past is not of interest only to science. Gothic fiction literature, born with the work "The Castle of Otranto" (Walpole, 1764), brings a theatrical life with ghostly characters and, like the counterfactuals, appropriates the past, focusing mainly on affections. With this, this research aimed to investigate the differences in the capacity to elaborate counterfactual thoughts in different age groups and, in addition, it verified the levels in which the creative parameters appear in narratives that rewrite the events of works with Gothic influence. The older age group was expected to produce more counterfactuals and use more elaboration in the creative process. The analysis of results took place from the content analysis of the narratives and was subject to comparison between groups using the Mann-Whitney Test, in addition, the scores in creative abilities were correlated to the types of counterfacts. The results showed that the group of adults had better counterfactual performance both in the Counterfactual Inference Test (CIT) and in the total numbers produced by both narratives. Among the counterfactual types, there was a strong preference for the additive type (structure-related) among adults, thus, this counterfactual type showed a significant correlation with all the creative parameters studied. In addition, the Doctor and the Monster narrative stood out in total numbers of counterfactuals.