Psychological Assessment of Contradiction Understanding

Abstract

A general orientation in a contradictory situation could involve either rejection of one of the opposing interpretations in favour of the other, or rejection of both, or looking for alternative possibilities that would allow to deem both interpretations valid. This orientation involves a number of mental processes, and a number of approaches can be used to assess it. The paper presents a review of existing methods assessing categorization processes, new experience aberrations, attention direction associated with object perception and event explanation/prediction, subjective control, choice, situational solution search, integration of different forms of thinking, self-awareness, and action strategy flexibility.