MITKO MOMOV & MIRENA PATSEVAThe Own and the Foreign in the Global Village
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume I, Number 01 (2018): 117-126

THE OWN AND THE FOREIGN IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE
Mitko Momov and Mirena Patseva

Abstract
According to Gal Ariely in the situation of globalization two opposite tendencies
can be observed with respect to the feeling of national identity: increase and reduction of the sense of identity.1 We will try to trace the dynamics of the concept
with the help of a psycholinguistic test conducted in different phases of Bulgaria’s
transition to democracy since 1989. The concepts illustrating the findings are‘foreigner’ and ‘motherland’ with a focus on the connotative meaning of the concepts on a subconscious level. During the first trial ‘foreigner’ evoked intensive
positive reactions, whereas nowadays the attractiveness and the striving for contact with the foreigner decrease. The ‘foreigner’ is no longer representative of theWest, but just a human, and could be emigrant or homeless. The personal experience in a situation of free mobility changes the viewpoint and the distance between the own and the foreign.
During the first trial, the declarative affiliation to ‘motherland’ imposedby the totalitarian ideology was not reflected in the test results, most probably due
to a reaction of resistance to its official propaganda. On the contrary – ‘motherland’ was associated with skeptical and even negative reactions. Our data also
show moderate consolidation of these reactions on subconscious level during thelast three decades, even as there have been constantly growing social criticism
and radical attitude in our societies.2
It is important to note that in both phases of the test the main focus of thereactions has been contrary to the dominant social mood: in 1989, the young people expressed negative attitude to the officially advanced patriotism; nowadays,
amid strong social critique of the state, the emotional reactions to it have become
more positive. Indeed, it appears that when the concept of homeland is threatened, especially amidst of a widely felt deficit of values, the erosion of feelings
does not penetrate at a deeper level.
Key words: identity, political attitude, semantic change, concept drift

1

Gal Ariely, “Globalization and Decline of National Identity? An Exploration Across Sixty Three countries,”
Nation and Nationalism, 18 (3) (ACEN/Blackwell Publishing, 2012), pp. 461‐482.
2
Vihren Bouzov, “‘Europe 2020’: Some Problems of Development in Romania and Bulgaria,” Maximizing
Comparative Advantages of Cross‐border Regions (Gabrovo: Express Ltd., 2013), p. 20.

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1. Introduction
The sense of the concepts of own and foreign has changed in recent decades. Although thecore meanings of the words have largely persisted, new semantic components and tendencies
in their connotation have emerged. We will try to trace the concept drift with the help of a
psycholinguistic test revealing the connotative meaning of the concepts. After Fokkens at al.,we define the semantic of concept drift as a change in the intension of a concept, while itscore remaining stable. 3 Although the processes of semantic change in general and of concept
drift in particular were originally discussed in semantics and psycholinguistics, they have also
become relevant to the work of a number of other academic fields, including philosophy, history, and political science. We shall present a longitudinal study on the dynamics of somesocial and political concepts with the aim to trace particular aspects of the transformation ofsocial and political attitudes in Bulgaria in the new political context of the decades after thetransition to democracy in 1989. We illustrate the concept drift using an analysis of associative tests results of the stimulus words motherland and foreigner. We take the concepts of
own and foreign to represent “conflict” zones at the present time of mobility and refugee flow,
and we endeavor to identify a tension between the longing to the foreign and the belonging tothe own, which could be detected in young people’s answers in different proportions during
the trials of the study.
In what follows, in Section 2 and Section 3, we make an overview of works on semantic change and concept drift respectively. In Section 4, we discuss some related work in thefield of the semantic shifts of political concepts. In Section 5, we introduce the methodology,
the procedure and the analysis of the present study. In Section 6, we offer a discussion of thestudy, and we conclude in Section 7.
2. Semantic change
Both the meaning and the outer form of the words change over time and at various rates. It is
generally considered that meaning is the most variable and shifting part of the linguistic sign.
Word meanings are highly dependent on context, whether that of the ongoing discourse or ofsocial and ideological changes.
Traditionally, semantic changes are classified in terms of opposing tendencies, such asbroadening and narrowing, and development of positive or negative meanings. An example ofbroadening (generalization or widening) is the noun dog, which was used to refer to somespecific breeds but nowadays means any dog. On the opposite side, the noun girl narrowed(specialized) its meaning: in Middle English, any young person could be called a girl; therestriction to female young persons occurred in the Modern period. The same process occurred with the meaning of the Bulgarian word лято, which meant year in Old Bulgarian andsubsequently narrowed its meaning to one season only – summer.
An illustration of melioration (development of positive meanings) is the word rude,
whose original meaning of ‘unmannered’ is rather negative, but nowadays could be used in amore positive sense as ‘physically attractive’. Words with negative meaning, such as killer,3

Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Isa Maks, and Davide Ceolin, “On the Semantics of Concept Drift: Towards Formal Definitions of Semantic Change,” In S. Darányi, L. Hollink, A. Meroño Peñuela, & E. Kontopoulos (Eds.), Proceedings of Drift-a-LOD (Bologna, 2016).

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are used in English, as well as in Bulgarian, jargon to designate powerful entities or to express
or evoke strong (including positive) feelings. As an example of pejoration, or development of
more negative meaning, could serve the noun communist. Another way in which semanticchanges have been traditionally classified is related to whether they are driven by languageinternal or by language-external factors. Language external factors are broadly cultural andsocial.
According to Willem B. Hollmann’s review of publications from the previous century,
semantic change was generally neglected in research for a considerable period of time.4 It was
not until Elizabeth Traugott endeavored to establish regularities in the semantic processes thatit came into focus. Traugott and Dasher maintained that there is a path from pragmaticallypolysemous meanings to new semantically polysemous meanings.5 Recently, scholars have
put forward different models for attesting regularities in semantic change, including Geeraerts’ Diachronic Prototype Semantics and Traugott and Dasher’s Invited Inference Theory of
Semantic Change, where semantic change regularities were identified by means of technological tools. New quantitative laws were also proposed, such as that of the correlation between
semantic change and frequency, modelled along the linear regression suggested by Hamilton
et al.6
3. Conceptual replacement and concept drift
In some of the cases of semantic change the core of the meaning changes, while in other cases
the change is only in the field of its connotation. The latter represents the concept drift – achange in the intension (associations) of a concept, while its core remains stable.7 If the coreof the concept changes as well, a new concept emerges, and we have a conceptual replacement. An example of the latter semantic change is the English word cute (based on Frermann
and Lapata).8 In the early 18th century, the word appeared with the meaning of ‘clever’. In thelate nineteenth century the meaning had shifted to ‘cunning’. It then shifted to its modern day
meaning of ‘sweet’ and ‘attractive’ (according to the Oxford English Dictionary).9
In this paper, we are particularly interested in the concept drift – the changes in thefield of connotation of the meanings of the word while the core remaining intact. As an ex4

Willem B. Hollmann, “Semantic Change,” In Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill, and Tony
McEnery (eds.), English Language: Description, Variation, and Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009: 536),
pp. 301-313.
5
Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Richard B. Dasher, Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 35.
6William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky, “DiachronicWord Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of
Semantic Change,” Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,(Berlin, Germany, August 7-12, 2016), p. 1495.
7
Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Isa Maks, and Davide Ceolin, “On the Semantics of Concept Drift: Towards Formal Definitions of Semantic Change,” In S. Darányi, L. Hollink, A. Meroño Peñuela, & E. Kontopoulos (Eds.), Proceedings of Drift-a-LOD (Bologna, 2016). Shenghui Wang, Stefan Schlobach, Michel
Klein, “Concept Drift and How to Identify It.” Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on theWorld Wide Web, 9 (3), (2011), pp. 247–265.
8
Lea Frermann and Mirella Lapata, “A Bayesian Model of Diachronic Meaning Change,” In Transactions of
the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 4, (2016: 31), pp. 31–45.
9Angus Stevenson, Oxford dictionary of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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ample of this phenomenon could serve the dynamics of the concept “democracy” traced in alongitudinal study using a word association technique conducted in 1989 and tree years later.10 The most frequent association was identical in both stages – “freedom.” The further associations, however, were quite different: in 1989 the concept was associated with “publicness,” “equality,” and “pluralism,” but three years later, none of these associative connections
were present. Instead, the stage was taken by skeptical statements of the type “It does not exist,” “utopia,” as well as by straightforward negativism with answers like “demagogy” and“falsehood.” Such changes in the connotation of meaning are especially important with regard
to contestable concepts, like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, whose meaning is very much a subject of debate. Contestable concepts are of interest for the purpose of determining how thepolitical climate changes in certain periods of time.11 Some of the latter concepts were imported in Bulgaria into the process of Westernization and globalization along with new technologies, values, and social models. The imported significations, however, were not merely
accepted but arouse specific reactions that were often indicative of particular national attitudes. In the process of concept drift, such stable attitudes were detectable along the changes
in the connotations of the new forms, concepts, or catchwords, like ‘democracy’.
4. Related work in the field of semantic shifts in political concepts
In historical linguistics, semantic shift describes the evolution of word usage. Each word has
multiple senses and connotations which can be added, removed, or altered over time. Hosein
Azarbonyad and colleagues use distributional semantics to detect temporal semantic shifts inpolitical and media discourse, as well as in the dimension of social and political variability.12
For instance, they have examined the semantic shifts in the meaning of words like “democracy” and “moral” over time and within the usage of the Conservative and Labour parties in the
UK parliament. The meaning of “moral” within the Labour party usage has shifted in timefrom that of the “philosophical” concept to that of a “liberal” one; whereas within the Conservative usage the meaning of this word has shifted from that of a “spiritual” concept to thatof a “religious” one. For its part, the meaning of “democracy” remains stable over time in theusage of both parties, however, the Conservatives refer to it mostly in the sense of a “unity,”
while the Labours associate it with “freedom” and “social justice.”This example is indicative of a change in the connotation of meaning over time. It isrelevant to our study in that we focus not so much on the denotative component of the language sign as on the connotative one, as the latter is indicative of the emotional charge andpower, which play a key part in inspiring people, forming their attitudes, and often directing
their behavior.

Mirena Patseva, “The Creation of New Meaning in the Process of Democratization of Eastern Europe,” Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 1994, Vol. 32, N 1, pp. 5-13.
11David Collier, F. Daniel Hidalgo, Andra Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Journal of
Political Ideologies 11(3), 2006: 213, pp. 211–226.
12
Hosein Azarbonyad et. Al., “Words are Malleable: Computing Semantic Shifts in Political and Media Discourse,” CIKM’17, November 6–10 (Singapore, Singapore, 2017), accessed April 4, 2018,https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.05603.pdf
10

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5. The present study
In our investigation, we focus on the concept shift of some social and political words, including contestable concepts. The goal of the study is to trace some directions of the dynamics ofparticular political concepts in the time of intensive changes, marked by cultural globalization, translocal culture, and postnational discourse (in the terms of Arjuna Appadurai).13 Because of their changing connotations, words from the political lexicon are vague, ambiguous,and difficult to define. We use the free association technique to illustrate the transformationsof connotative meaning over a relatively short period of historical time.
The beginning of the study coincides with the beginning of democratic changes in
Bulgaria in 1989 in the context of political enthusiasm after the totalitarian period. Twentytwo stimulus words were used, belonging to (1) the socio-political domain (democracy, power, freedom) and some fundamental categories of human life (family, work, holiday). Treeexperimental methods were used: associative test, definition technique, and text method. The
first one was expected to offer information on affective meaning; through the latter two, we
attempted to approximately identify the main body of meaning. We will present here some
findings of the first method only, which was used in the next stages of the experiment. We
compare the data obtained in 1989 and those obtained in two recent trials – in 2015 and2017.14 The data of the latter two stages are grouped together due to the relatively short time
distance between them.15 In the last two stages, we expanded the questioning by taking into
account the gender differences in the responses.
5.1. Methodology – free associative test
The psychological associations refer to the connections between conceptual entities or mental
states that result from the similarity or proximity in space or time. The idea comes from Platoand Aristotle, and was carried on by philosophers like Locke and Hume among others. The
same notion is also used in the contemporary psychology, and more particularly in the socalled neural network models. Semantic network theory proposes that a word’s meaning isrepresented by a set of nodes and the associative links among them. The semantic informationin such a network is accessed through a spreading activation, whereas the mental process inwhich it occurs are thought to be automatic.16 Ultimately, these characteristics of associations
enable us to obtain information from the deeper structures of the mental activity. The freeassociative test measures the implicit or subconscious content of concepts, based on the assumption that associations are activated without effort, and outside of conscious control.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
14
During the first stage we conducted a comparative study of the national specifics of the meanings of thewords in our focus, based on an input from Bulgarian and Russian students (4033 subjects). We consider the
cross cultural data obtained in it to be an additional telling dimension of the tendencies we identified.
15
Other stages were discussed in Mirena Patseva and Mitko Momov, Tsennostnoto initsiirane of 90s in Bulgaria (Sofia: Agata 1998), pp. 114-161 (in Bulgarian).
16
Matthew Traxler, Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Understanding Language Science (Malden, MA; Oxford,
UK: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2012), p. 81.
13

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5.2. Procedure: participants and material
The participants in the tests were students at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and St.
Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo (19 to 30 years old). Minimum 100
people took part in the questioning at each stage; in the last two trials they were 50% maleand 50% female participants. The procedure of the associative experiment was as follows:each respondent was given a list of all the stimulus words and the task of responding to eachstimulus with “the first word that comes to mind”. The response time was not restricted but it
did not exceed 20 minutes. Among the 22 stimulus words there were political concepts, suchas: democracy, security, property, freedom, leader, war, as well as everyday words like man,woman, work, family, or holiday. Thus, we obtained 100 answer-associations for each stimulus in each trial. In our analysis we targeted four elements:
1. Semantic analysis
2. Level of stereotypicality
3. Level of abstraction
4. As well as, the distribution of the responses into semantic domains
We present here the first two of these elements in relation to the data of two stimulus
words – motherland and foreigner, which are related to the concepts own and foreign.
5.3. Semantic analysis
The comparison of the most frequent reactions defines the focuses in the semantic connotation of the words. The whole list of obtained reactions is distributed into semantic groups or
fields by experts.17 The semantic groups are analogous to semantic components (semes) – theimportant features by which speakers of language distinguish different words. These semantic
groups do not reveal the entire structure of the word meaning but mainly its connotation. The
semantic groups give information about the actual focuses in the semantic structure. In tracing
the dynamics of these semantic focuses, we keep in mind the observation of Alexander Potebnya that lexical units express not the whole content of the notion, but only those features
which are most important for the people.18 The particular configuration of semantic groups ineach stage is informative for the modifications of the connotative meaning. What is importantfor us here is that the semantic data obtained in the associative test is not declarative but it
reflects an automatic level of mental life, which is out of conscious control, and thus gives
information about implicit or tacit knowledge. Our semantic analysis will be illustrated by thestimulus words motherland and foreigner.
Motherland
Motherland is perhaps the most stereotypical stimulus-word nowadays (Table 1). The mostcommon reaction to it in 1989 was the neutral word Bulgaria (with 13% of the responses). In
the later stages of the test this changed with the number of the respondents with the same answer more than doubled (31%). This quantitative difference reveals a tendency towards neutralization and stereotyping of the concept. Other repeated reactions to ‘motherland’, like17

The distribution of reactions into semantic groups is based on their similarity and is provided by minimum two
experts independently.
18
Alexander Potebnya, Estetika i poetika (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), p. 221 (in Russian).

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country and fatherland, were also neutral (13%). In 1989, 20% of the participants associatedtheir own country with beautiful land and nature of Bulgaria, whereas in the latest trials they
are more than twice less (9%). Young people also associated motherland with home and family, with the quantification doubling in the latest trials (from 5% in 1989 to 10% in 2015/2017).
One possible interpretation of this result could be the narrowing of the national identity concept to the realm of the family.
During the last stages some female participants appeared to express emotions detectable along responses like love and affection, whereas some men came up more evaluative reactions such as value, sacredness, wealth. In 1989, the young people did not appear inclined toexpress their patriotic feelings towards motherland – reactions like patriotism and proud were
missing (unlike in the latest trials), and reactions like dear were rare. Only few Bulgarian men
and only one girl gave mother as reaction.19 Before 1989, the totalitarian ideology had largely
imposed a more or less unquestionable affiliation to the motherland. This, however, was notreflected in the test results possibly due to a tacit rejection on the part of the participants of theofficial propaganda of the communist government. Quite the opposite, in 1989, relatively
strong negative feelings were expressed in response to this stimulus word in answers such as
nonsense, devaluation, barrack, chaos, mess, or darkness; as well as in terms of existential
conflicts such as accusation and conscience (totaling 16%). For comparison, two and a half
decades later, the related negative reactions were only a few (3%), even if a reaction likenothing could be interpreted as indicative of a crisis of the sense of belonging.
Thus, we can conclude that the dynamics of the connotative meaning of the concept motherland is towards a narrowing to the realm of the family, along the increasing number of neutral andmoderate positive reactions. The critical attitude and tension of 1989 is replaced by calmer feelings
accompanied by lower levels of skepticism and negativism in 2015 and 2017.
Table 1. Distribution of reactions to the stimulus word motherland.
Semantic groups
1989
2015/2017
Bulgaria
13%
31%
country3%
5%
fatherland
10%
8%nature, beautiful land
20
9%home, family
5%
10%
love, dear
11%15%
mother2%
2%
sacred, holy2%4%unique, one, and only one
3%2%
patriotism, proud–5%social feelings: duty, conscience7%–
skepticism: barrack, nothing,
4%2%
Negation: nonsense, devaluation, mess
5%
1%

19

For comparison, mother is the most frequent reaction for Russians associated with the well-known expressionродина – мать ‘motherland-mother’. One other comparative observation is also important: among most frequent Russian answers is also the capital city Moscow – the center of the country. Bulgarians never mention
their capital Sofia. So, unlike Russian, the Bulgarian identity concept seems less centralized.

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MITKO MOMOV & MIRENA PATSEVAThe Own and the Foreign in the Global Village*The numbers represent the percentage ratio of the semantic group quantification of the total
number of reactions obtained for one stimulus word. (The total could be less than 100% due
to missing answers and because not all reactions are included into the semantic groups).
Foreigner
In 1989, the foreigner was an interesting (26%) and attractive figure (Table 2). He or she
evoked curiosity and a desire for contact, and was seen mostly as a representative of the West(European, American). But there is a significant decrease in the interest towards him or her
two and a half decades later. A central semantic group nowadays is alien and different (12%).
The image of the foreigner became more concrete and the importance of his or her social status decreased: he or she is no longer investor or uncle from America and could be also emigrant or prisoner.
The foreigner still appears to be more attractive for women who associate him or her
with high standard and money, culture, intellect and education. The foreigner evokes curiosity and wish for acquaintance. The study results also show men as being more reserved in theirattitude towards the foreigner: for some of them the foreigner is interesting, can be friend(4%), but the majority of answers are indifferent: a man (4%), can be a guest (3%), a tourist(4%), or an emigrant (5%) looking for job. Men give a few isolated negative reactions as
well: intruder, parasite. One possible explanation for the warmer women’s reactions is the
masculine gender characteristic of the stimulus word.
Table 2. Distribution of reactions to the stimulus word foreigner
Semantic groups
1989
2015/2017
foreign, alien, different
4%
12%
man
2%
8%
interest, curiosity
26%
7%
attractive
4%
1%
contact
3%2%European, American, Italian
5%8%Emigrant, Gipsy, prisoner–
5%
tourist
3%
7%
guest
1%
3%
friend5%
4%currency, money
17%
4%
investor, uncle from America
4%1%nice dress, sun glasses,
2%–
culture, education
2%
1%
alone, loneliness2%–
Negation:: parasite, intruder, arrogant
1%
7%
As a whole, the tendency with regard to the foreigner appears to be towards a diminished interest. The few isolated negative reactions are not a reason to suspect a crisis of toler-

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ance. The dynamics of semantic groups, however, indicates a tendency towards a certain restraint in the attitude to the foreigner.
Level of stereotypicality
Following Alexandra Zalevskaya, we use two methods to measure the level of stereotypicalreactions: (1) the average quantity of different (not coinciding) answers and (2) the percentageof the first three most frequent reactions.20 In 1989, the results showed a low level of stereotypical reactions: the average value of different reactions was relatively high (70.17%),
whereas the percentage of the first tree most often repeated reaction was relatively small(24.14%). In the recent stages of the study in 2015/2017, the latter was higher (29.5%) andthe average quantity of different (not coinciding) answers was smaller (59.1%). That is, withthe time, the level of stereotypicality grows up, whereas the diversity of answers decreases. It
seems a paradox that during the time of regimentation of the totalitarian regime the level ofstereotypical reactions was lower. Our conjecture here is that perhaps at that time the young
Bulgarians deliberately distanced themselves from the cliché, strove for originality, and thus
gave more diverse answers. The results of our study also suggest that during the years of
democratic changes with the increase of social opportunities the diversity of reactions decreases. For us, this means that during the time of destabilization and stratification of the society the associative reactions show the opposite tendency to group together (into the neutral
realm), such that the level of stereotypicality increased. This result may reflect a compensatory unconscious reaction of non‐acceptance of the dogma of the totalitarian regime in 1989
along a striving for originality. The same mechanism of opposition to the general trend of thecontemporary pluralism and diversity results in a kind of “consolidation” within the neutral
realm (the most frequent reactions are neutral words like man and Bulgaria). Another possible interpretation could be related to the fact that nowadays some young people cannot but
maturate without any help by their parents or by the government, which could have conditioned the replacement of the metaphorical reactions and play on words (characteristic for thedata of 1989) with more neutral and sober reaction.
6. Discussion
The tenser feelings which characterized the reactions to the stimulus word motherland in thefirst trial of the study were subsequently replaced by more neutral answers. Unlike in 1989,
there is almost no negativism among the latest answers. Paradoxically, this comes on the
background of a constantly growing social criticism and radical attitude in our societies.21 The
strong criticism towards the government in the mass media and in the public space is almost
absent in the associative reactions to the concept motherland. Our conjecture here is that bothconcepts (government and motherland) are kept separate in the minds of the young people.
Participants in the later trials keep their notion of motherland unaffected by the critical evalu-

20

Alexandra Zalevskaya, “Dynamics of Meaning of the ‘Live Word’ in Science and in Common Knowledge,”
Gisap: Philological Sciences, No. 3 (2014), p. 13, accessed November 15, 2017,
http://Journals.Gisap.Eu/Index.Php/Philological/Article/No3,201421
Vihren Bouzov, “‘Europe 2020’,” pp. 15‐32.

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ations of the government and express a certain level of (even if not very enthusiastic) patriotism.
The more intensive positive attitude to the foreigner in 1989 could be explained as areaction to the hostile official politics of the communist regime towards the different West.
The emotional grade of the reactions decreases nowadays: the answers are more balanced andthe image of the foreigner is more concrete. But the foreigner is no longer representative onlyof the West – he or she is just a human, be it emigrant or homeless. Another perspective also
emerged: the opening of the borders made it possible for many students to experience themselves as foreigners in other countries. They may have longed for their homes but upon coming back many of them experienced difficulties to find their place there. This feeling is expressed in the answer I am a foreigner in my own country. In other words, the personal experience abroad changes the view point and the distance between the own and the foreign.
Conclusions
The main goal of this paper was to show the dynamics of the connotative meaning of somepolitical and social concepts. Word meaning is highly dependent on context – not only that of
the ongoing discourse, but also that of the social dynamics. Semantic changes could be traced
in longitudinal studies using associative test. Our analysis reveals certain semantic groups ascorresponding to certain semantic components. The dynamic of their configuration traces particular tendencies in the modification of the connotative meaning, which gives information
about the participants’ tacit attitudes. We hope that our data could complement those of sociological studies which deal primarily with declarative assessments and deliberately formulated
opinions.
The skeptical and critical attitude towards the own national identity expressed in 1989
(in opposition to the official public discourse at that time) is replaced by a moderate and calm
patriotic attitude (also in opposition to the prevailing critical public discourse). The tense andeven negative feelings are reduced and replaced by neutral reactions amid unrestrained criticism in the social space in the period of the last two trials. Accordingly, it is worth noting thatin the two discussed phases of the test the main tendencies revealed in the analysis of the reactions are contrary to the mood of the dominant public discourse: in 1989 amid keenly imposed patriotism of the totalitarian state, young people expressed negation. Now amid strongsocial critique in the public space, the emotional reactions in the associative test are relieved.
The curiosity and the interest in the foreign and the foreigner is undoubtedly a characteristic feature of the Bulgarian folk psychology. Probably this interest has evolved during theperiods of confinement and limitations in the country’s history. The attractive image of theother/the foreigner could be seen as a projection of unfulfilled desires and is usually associated with the fact that our own efforts have not always been adequate enough to meet our recurrent needs. Perhaps the massive offensive of the foreign at all levels of life in the last decades
deflects the former mystery and charm of the foreigner and causes a withdrawal from the aspiration for contacts with him or her. On the other hand, the onset of individualistic values
following the end of the totalitarian regime seems to reduce the openness and the desire forcontact with the other.

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