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ABSTRACT
Despite the prevalence of fantasy activities in day-to-day life, there has been little systematic psychological research on fantasy. Existing work is scattered across numerous fantasy-related topics and are rarely viewed as a collective body of work. We propose a scale of fantasy engagement that addresses this scattered and often-contradictory literature by assessing both positive and negative aspects of fantasy engagement. Across four studies we develop and validate the Fantasy Engagement Scale, establishing its reliability, validity, and applicability to topics including well-being, escapism, and mental imagery. The results begin to reconcile contradictions in the existing research and have implications for future work on fantasy specifically and for studies of fantasy-related activities.
Notes
For all studies, participants were unable to sign up for more than one study from our laboratory on MTurk, eliminating the possibility that the same participants were in multiple studies.
When interpreting these statistics, lower RMSEA values and higher CFI and NFI values indicate better model fit. See West, Taylor, and Wu (Citation2012) for a detailed discussion about interpreting fit statistics and the problem of setting cutoff points for determining adequacy of model fit.
In a third model, the error variances of the two items about fantasy having a positive effect and fantasy making one a better person were allowed to covary. Doing so made the model fit well (CFI = .984, RMSEA = .062, NFI = .978). However, as this pathway was not hypothesized a priori, and for reasons of parsimony in presenting the two-factor model, this model was dropped from the main analysis in the present and all subsequent analyses.