Image Analysis as the Means of Cultural Representation Study in a Worldview

The purpose of the article is to present the methodology of image analysis as the means of cultural representation study in a worldview on the example of the image “work”. The research is based on the idea that any phenomena of reality perceived by a person in the process of activity and communication are revealed in his mind through images. These images record not only causal and spatial relationships of phenomena and emotions in the process of perception, but also can be characterized by a certain social and ethno-cultural peculiarities, dynamism and variability. The images connected with real-world objects are studied through the mixed methods research including the associative experiment and gradual scaling. Associative fields constructed in the course of the experiment allow analyzing images from linguistic and psycholinguistic points of view according to the formalgrammatical features of the received responses, contiguity - similarity classification, and semantic field grouping. The experiment was organised between the equal number of Russian, Chinese and Arabic students of 20-25 years old. The interest to study this age group is explained by the fact that it is young people who form the future of any country and society in general. To study the perception of the image “work” the respondents were asked to fulfill the questionnaires in their native languages where they were to write the first association that came to their mind when they saw the word-stimulus. All responses presented in the article were translated into the English language. In conclusion, the authors summarise the received results, describe the complex structure of various associative pairs, and identify differences and similarities in the perception of the studied image in worldviews of various culture representatives.