A well-known method of studying iconic words is through the collection of subjective ratings. We collected such ratings regarding familiarity, iconicity, imagery/imageability, concreteness, sensory experience rating (SER), valence and arousal for Mandarin ABB words. This is a type of phrasal compound consisting of a prosaic syllable A and a reduplicated BB part, resulting in a vivid phrasal compound, for example, wù-mángmáng 雾茫茫 ‘completely foggy’. The correlations between the newly collected ABB ratings are contrasted with two other sets of prosaic word ratings, demonstrating that variables that characterize ABB words in an absolute sense may not play a distinctive role when contrasted with other types of words. Next, we provide another angle for looking at ABB words, by investigating to what degree rating data converges with corpus data. By far, the variable that characterizes ABB items consistently throughout these case studies is their high score for imageability, showing that they are indeed rightfully characterized as vivid. Methodologically, we show that it pays off to not take rating data at face value but to contrast it with other comparable datasets of a different phenomenon or data about the same phenomenon compiled in an ontologically different manner.

Individuals are generally reluctant to trade goods—a phenomenon identified as the endowment effect. This paper focuses on consumers’ puzzling reluctance to exchange gambles, and in particular lottery tickets with identical distribution (i.e., same odds of winning), and identifies the ticket’s vividness as an important moderator. Three studies demonstrate that individuals are more willing to exchange less vivid lottery tickets (e.g., tickets concealed in envelopes, or tickets with an unknown number) compared to more vivid tickets (e.g., tickets not concealed in envelopes, or tickets with a known number) when offered an incentive to exchange. Moreover, this effect is mediated by anticipated regret, such that less regret is anticipated when exchanging less vivid tickets, thus increasing individuals’ willingness to exchange tickets.

This paper argues that we should distinguish two different kinds of imaginative vividness: vividness of mental images and vividness of imaginative experiences. Philosophy has focussed on mental images, but distinguishing more complex vivid imaginative experiences from vivid mental images can help us understand our intuitions concerning the notion as well as the explanatory power of vividness. In particular, it can help us understand the epistemic role imagination can play on the one hand and our emotional engagement with literary fiction on the other hand.

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the ‘vivacity’ or ‘vividness’ of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use ‘vividness’ and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not take much reflection to see that these terms are poorly understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature in an attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable.