Background. This is the application part of a two-part paper that starts from the assumption that core cognition for promoting agent well-being is shared by all living beings. In Part 1, we derived a number of key terms of core cognition and two behavioral ontologies: coping and co-creation. 

Objective. Our first aim is to extend the conceptual framework and two behavioral ontologies, while explaining, from first principles, the observed basic structure in identity development. The second is to apply core cognition on a metatheoretical level to explain how the two theories about fostering well-being show the characteristic features of our two behavioral ontologies. 

Results. We demonstrate that the four different combinations of coping, co-creation, adequacy, and inadequacy explain from first principles the underlying structure of identity. Among other things, these accurately leads us to the defining features of authoritarianism.
The notion of ontological security, as it is known in the literature, accurately describes the coping mode’s restricted capacity for the creation and protection of well-being. Ontological security leads to a self-limiting form of well-being that has been described as “abnormal normality.” In contrast, psychological safety provides the preconditions for high well-being and a safe environment, thus promoting the healthy development of coping and co-creation adequacy. 

Background. In Russia, there is a demand for evaluation of children’s well-being, including subjective well-being, at the national and regional levels. To implement such an evaluation system, it is necessary to develop a Russian Child Well-Being Index (CWBI), which includes indicators of both objective and subjective well-being in several domains. One can rely on various national data sources that can be partially integrated into the CWBI, as well as the application of the UNICEF/Innocenti methodology for children’s well-being evaluation and new developments by Russian research teams.

Objective. To analyze the Russian experience in developing approaches to large-scale and multidimensional evaluation of children’s well-being (with an emphasis on subjective well-being) and to provide recommendations for development of the national Children’s Well-Being Index (CWBI).

Design. Scoping review of the methodology and results of the studies that can inform the Russian task force on CWBI development.

Results. Like most international models of subjective well-being, a Russian CWBI will be based on various aspects of the socio-ecological approach. The  structure of domains vary but is generally compatible with  the UNICEF/Innocenti model. The tools used by Russian researchers have included standardized psychometric techniques (as an independent tool and as a control of various types of validity); questionnaires specially designed to operationalize certain domains of well-being; and qualitative methods applied to small samples of children, such as focus groups, and creative and play-based methods. Work on the development of the CWBI (including the subjective well-being indicators) has been most actively performed in relation to children in state care; therefore, many of the tools have been designed to address the particular characteristics of this target group.

Conclusion. Recommendations for development of the national Children’s Well-Being Index (CWBI) are given, including both the index design and organizational/ethical considerations. 

Background. Many studies have shown that problem-focused coping and a positive reappraisal of one’s situation are the most conducive to achieving life goals and psychological well-being, whereas avoidance coping and self-blame have a negative impact on well-being. But there is not enough data on what the predictors of these coping strategies are in the situational context.

Objective. To assess the combined influence of subjective appraisal (uncontrollability, unclearness, negative emotions) and orientations in difficult situations (by drive and rejection) on planful problem solving, positive reappraisal, wishful thinking (fantasizing), and self-blame.

Design. The research has a survey design. The sample consisted of 637 adult participants who analyzed difficult situations in their lives associated with achieving significant life goals of various types (N = 637; 60% female; M_age = 24.2; SD = 6.25). Two alternative structural models were assessed, which include subjective appraisals of the situation (uncontrollability, unclearness, intensity of negative emotions), orientations in difficult situations (drive and rejection), and ways of coping (planful problem-solving, positive reappraisal, wishful thinking, and self-blame).

Results. The first model, in which all cognitive appraisals and orientations in difficult situations directly influence coping strategies, has relatively low fit indices. The second model, in which the influence of cognitive appraisal was partially mediated by orientations in difficult situations, has better fit indices. In life situations involving solution of a difficult task, the strongest predictor of problem-focused coping and positive reappraisal is the “drive” orientation of being attracted to difficulties, which mediates the influence of subjective control and emotions on these ways of coping. An orientation away from difficulties, “rejection,” mediates the influence of unclearness and negative emotions on fantasizing and self-blame. A low level of subjective control directly affects self-blame and the avoidance of problem-solving. Negative emotions are a weak predictor of self-blame.

Conclusion. Interaction between the subject and the situation involves appraisal of difficulty, which influences orientation in difficult situations. In turn, orientations are predictors of coping strategies. The characteristics of the psychological situation determine coping, which may be oriented toward approach to or avoidance of the goal.

Background. The relationship between technology use and subjective well-being is controversial, with recent research suggesting both positive and negative links. Thus, it is important to determine whether using technology actually leads to flourishing and well-being. To do so, the construct of TechnoWellness, which includes both adaptive and maladaptive modes of using technology, could be particularly useful. Moreover, the mechanisms that account for these relationships have been insufficiently explored.

Objective: With this study, we had two objectives. First, we aimed to test the relationships between TechnoWellness and the three components of subjective well-being (positive affect, negative affect, and satisfaction with life). Secondly, we aimed to investigate whether optimism mediates those relationships.

Design: A total of 366 participants (122 men and 244 women, mean age = 22.34 years old) took part in this study. In this cross-sectional investigation, we measured TechnoWellness, optimism, positive and negative affect, satisfaction with life, and some demographic variables, using an online form. To verify our aims we used structural equation modeling (SEM) with mediation.

Results: Among the positive factors of TechnoWellness, only using technology for physical activity was directly associated with satisfaction with life. Among the negative factors, the stress caused by technology use was directly associated with negative affect. Optimism mediated the relationships between these two factors (using technology for physical activity and stress caused by technology use) and all the components of subjective well-being.

Conclusion: Using technology to foster wellness is related to actual subjective well-being. However, the purpose, frequency, and type of its use are important elements to be considered when studying its effects.

This article describes research on visual semantics, different forms of metaphor used in rhetoric and philology (tropes: metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, oxymoron, and others), and images, which are metaphorical also. The research was carried out using paintings. The authors state that the function of metaphor is to transform the sense of the image from a psychological point of view.

The article contains a brief review of the concept «context» which is gaining its place among the key concepts in modern theoretical and empirical psychology. A comprehensive analysis of scientific literature leads the authors to distinguish two complementary conceptions of context – structural (which regards a fragment of a text as a semantic system) and functional (which treats it as a mental sensegenerating mechanism). The authors suggest an understanding of mentality as a recursive-contextual phenomenon, where each fragment of its subject matter exists in the context of other fragments – parallel, preceding or ensuing. Such understanding may form a basis for the contextual approach in psychology.

This paper summarizes the organizational and scientific outcomes of the 5th Congress of the Russian Psychological Society. It shows the RPS's dynamics of development since its establishment to the present day, and presents a report on the Congress's major events, and the statistics in comparison with the other events of international scientific life. Scientific sections of the Congress are grouped that allowed to showing the main trends in modern psychology. The new directions of psychological research debuted on the Congress are shown, the most important domains of the psychological science are highlighted, and possible reasons for some of them not having succeeded are given. The new subjects and objects of psychological studies new to psychologists are identified. Based on the historical view of the contemporary psychology, were analyzed the future directions of its development.

The paper introduces virtual reality systems as a new methodolology of carrying out both traditional and originally designed experimental studies in psychology and in a broader context - in neuroscience. This methodology, often differing from classical approaches toward planning and performing a study in cognitive, social, educational, organizational and numerous other disciplines within psychology, is placed in the context of genuine Russian and at the same time of world-wide psychological theories, conceptions and traditions. Advantages, currently available results, challenges and perspectives of the virtual paradigm in experimental psychology, psychotherapy and psychological rehabilitation are thoroughly described and analyzed. The ideas of immersive virtuality are also shown to play a profound role at diverse levels of innovative learning and teaching, including special, extracurricular, and college education. Besides, applied virtual reality sys­tems are presented as being of serious importance for the university students' training: it is expected that new generations of professional psychologists will use these systems extensively. The multifaceted theoretical activities and applied work of the staff and students affiliated with the Psychology Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University, aimed at development and usage of immersive virtual reality systems are fully presented in the paper.

One of the central topics in the studies of O. K. Tikhomirov and his collaborators was the link between cognitive and emotional processes. It is important not only how emotions are involved in the process of the productive performance of thinking tasks but also how cognitive processes mediate the involvement of the emotions in the regulation of activity. The efficacy of this regulation is represented through goal achievement and also through the correction of one’s actions in the case of wrongdoing. Reformation of one’s errors is the best way to improve one’s abilities and skills. In moral philosophy the central instance of this reformation is conscience, which ensures positive or negative self-appraisal of one’s own and others’ actions. Unfortunately, in psychology this concept remains unclear. The goal of this article is to clarify it in the context of the contemporary psychology of emotion. Studies of emotions have shown the significance of appraisal in determining particular feelings. The special role of moral emotions, mainly guilt and shame, in the self-correction of one’s actions is emphasized. According to this model, guilt and shame in particular can represent twinges of conscience in the mind because the cognitive dissonance between our (or others’) actions and values shapes the basis of all these phenomena.

This articles concerns the relatively and new and specifically developed in Russia methodology of research of social consciousness. The purpose and in the same time the method of the research using this methodology is reconstruction the system of categories (superordinate personal constructs in the terminology of G. Kelly) through which people perceive world and events around him (her). Especially it is very powerful method when dealing with political and socio-cultural issues, because allows to explicate implicit stereotypes which typically are very deep and difficult for diagnostic. Several examples from different topics of political psychology will be presented.

Objective: This study was designed to examine possible new aspects of creative activity related to virtual environments.

Design: The online gaming interface Minecraft was used to construct (on computer screens) complex structures such as buildings from ready-made blocks. Two modes were used: individual and dyadic. Participants (N=49, 29 males and 20 females, 18 to 29 years old, recruited on a snow-ball basis) were required to build staying at a distance two complex structures — a ship and a house; each structure was required to be highly creative, i.e. unusual and never seen before. Creativity was evaluated not by the final structure but by the number of ideas generated by the participants and produced either in practice or verbally. Each participant participated once in an individual and once in a dyadic session; the partners were selected randomly. The participants’ verbal activity and digital operations with the Minecraft interface were recorded using the FastStone Capture software package. All the ideas produced by participants were classified in accordance with the following criteria: type (conceptual, functional, selective, corrective, and intentional); level of the structure which the ideas referred to (the whole structure, a particular component of the structure, or an element of the structure); and the status of the verbalized ideas (implemented or unimplemented).

Results and Conclusion: The results show that participants produced significantly more ideas and took significantly less time to build the prescribed structure (a house or a ship) within the individual session compared to the dyadic session. The originality of their ideas was measured by two psychologists independently: the two measures turned out to be close (r=0.876); the number of original ideas produced during individual and dyadic sessions do not differ significantly. Analysis of the implementation of the ideas showed that, within the dyadic sessions, participants produced significantly fewer ideas which were subsequently implemented. For the most part they frequently dropped and left unimplemented ideas referring to the levels of either components or elements of the structure. The results also showed that intentions were the only type of ideas which, after being generated equally often in the individual and dyadic sessions, were more often left unimplemented in the group sessions, compared to the individual sessions.

This article considers the potential for applying contemporary philosophical theories (which distinguish classical, nonclassical, and postnonclassical types of scientific rationality) to the specification of theoretical methodological principles in the study of clinical psychology. We prove that psychological syndrome analysis (developed by the Vygotsky–Luria–Zeigarnik school), taken as a system of principles for organizing research as well as for interpreting its results, conforms to the epistemological complexity of the object of study in clinical psychology, which is understood in the postnonclassical scientific view as a self-developing system. We present an example of the formation of a psychosomatic syndrome in 290 patients with mitral-valve prolapse, applying methods of qualitative and statistical data analysis in a longitudinal clinical-psychological study. We prove that the syndrome is system-defined and has a multilevel character, and that its structure is determined by several factors: the motivational factor (with the domination of the failure-avoidance motive and the unsatisfied self-approval need); the factor of the emotional-regulation disorders, represented by both excessive emotional repression and lack of emotional control; and a psychophysiological factor. We argue that a psychosomatic syndrome can be used as a means for approaching not only diagnostic but also prognostic tasks both in clinical psychology and in medicine. We conclude that the results of our empirical study, conducted within the framework of postnonclassical philosophy and using the methods of psychological syndrome analysis, not only expand the scientific background on the nature of a particular disease (mitral-valve prolapse) but also pose further questions whose investigation will broaden our view of the psychological mechanisms of psychosomatic- syndrome genesis.

This article looks at the content strategies of the Russian media and discusses whether they conform to humanitarian values. The content strategies that prevailed in different eras and the social and psychological effects that they engendered are compared. Special attention is paid to conflicts of values and other negative consequences of the communicative incompetence of the media in Russia; this lack of competence poses a threat to the information security of society.

The article describes the development of an integrative bio-psycho-social model of personality disorders. This model is based on the interconnection of intellect, self-regulation, self-identity, and social relationships. The prognostic value of the category of “affective-cognitive style” is estimated on the grounds of a meta-analysis of various empirical studies and theoretical models. The article discusses the results of clinical and experimental studies that specify the functions of cognitive differentiation and integrity and of symbolic mediation and reflection in the regulation of the content, emotional valence, temporal stability, and spatial organization of intrapsychic representations of self and interpersonal relationships, as well as the systemic organization of defense and coping operations.

This article presents an analysis of Vygotsky’s work on the psychology of art and his use of the image of Hamlet in the psychological analysis of personality. It also describes the capabilities of the dialectic method for assessing psychological problems. Reference to three dialectical oppositions—of the story and the plot, of the main character’s spinelessness and his insanity, and of subject and personality—allows the development of a theoretical analysis of the psychology of personality in its relationship to culture. Culture is defined as the system of normative situations. Keywords: image of Hamlet, dialectic method, culture, normative situation, personality, subject.

The work presents historiographic and theoretical methodological study of establishment of fundamental theses of L.S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical concept within the field of clinical psychology.

We prove potency in application of contemporary philosophical concepts, which help distinguish between the types of scientific rationality (classical, nonclassical, and postnonclassical), for scientific reflection over the development of psychology and designation of paradigmatic status of cultural-historic concept suggested by L.S. Vygotsky and Vygotsky-Luria syndrome approach at the contemporary stage of science.

Present study of scientific works of L.S. Vygotsky and his followers demonstrated that fundamentals of cultural-historic conception suggested by L.S. Vygotsky and further developed in methodology of Vygotsky-Luria syndrome approach, these fundamentals presented the origins of not only non-classical, but as well post-nonclassical model of scientific rationality. They are characterized by post-nonclassical understanding of the object and method of psychological study and post-nonclassical mode of thinking of the scientists.

As it was showed, in works of L.S. Vygotsky there formulated general methodological requirements to organization of mental studies, which, on the whole, go in tune with the requirements introduced for study of complex self-developing systems. There were produced arguments to prove that the concept of Vygotsky-Luria syndrome approach describes mental syndromes as dynamic structures, which display the features of self-organization, self-determination and adaptive rationality. Hence, they can be regarded as open self-developing systems.

We assume and verify the hypothesis that the syndrome analysis, due to the features of post-nonclassic modeling of scientific rationality it reveals, may be regarded as theoretically productive methodological approach at the modern stage of science.

The article aims to demonstrate advances in methodological means suggested by Vygotsky’s cultural-historical concept in association with a theoretical model of a Person-centered diagnosis and practical use of the construct for clinical psychology and medicine. This, to a greater extent, arises from the fact that the cultural-historical concept (due to its humanistic nature and epistemological content) is closely related to the person-centered integrative approach. But for all that the concept corresponds to the ideals of postnonclassical model of scientific rationality with a number of ‘key’ features. Above all it manifests its “methodological maturity” to cope with open self-developing systems, which is most essential at the modern stage of scientific knowledge.

The work gives consideration to ‘defining pillars’ of Person-centered approach in modern medicine, to humanistic traditions of the Russian clinical school, and high prospects in diagnostics of such mental constructs as “subjective pattern of disease” and “social situation of personal development in disease” - within the context of person-centered integrative diagnosis.

This article discusses the need for implementation a cross-cultural study of subjective pattern of disease and its correlation with a particular “social situation of personality development under disease conditions”. It aims at development and substantiation of the model of person-centered integrative approach, enhancement of its diagnostic scope and, consequently, improvement of the model of person-centered care in modern psychiatry and medicine.

Background. Ideas about relationships between “I”, egocentric spatial orientation and the sense of bodily “Self ” date back to work by classics of philosophy and psychology. Cognitive neuroscience has provided knowledge about brain areas involved in self-ref­erential processing, such as the rostral prefrontal, temporal and parietal cortices, often active as part of the default mode network (DMN).

Objective and Method. Little is known about the contribution of inferior parietal areas to self-referential processing. Therefore, we collected observations of everyday be­havior, social communication and problem solving in patients with brain lesions local­ized either in the left inferior parietal cortex (LIPC group, n = 45) or the right inferior parietal cortex (RIPC group, n = 58).

Results. A key characteristic of the LIPC group was an overestimation of task com­plexity. This led to a prolonged phase of redundant and disruptive contemplations pre­ceding task solution. In the RIPC group, we observed disorders in reflective control and voluntary regulation of behavior. Abilities for experiencing emotions, understanding mental states, and social communication were to a great extent lost. Results are inter­preted within a multilevel framework of cognitive-affective organization (velichkovsky, 2002). In particular, we highlight the role of right-hemisphere mechanisms in self-refer­ential cognition, emotional and corporeal awareness. This is consistent with recent data on a profound asymmetry in connectivity of left and right hippocampi within the DMN (Ushakov et al., 2016)

Conclusion. It seems that the center of egocentric spatial representation plays a spe­cial role in accessing self-related data. Normally, the right hippocampus provides a holis­tic representation of surrounding and, thus, an easy-to-find gateway into much of what we used to call “subjective experience”. This heuristics becomes misleading in the case of right-sided brain lesions.

Play and playfulness are basic features in early childhood education. The elements of play are pleasure, a sense of freedom, and the co-construction of shared meaning through the use of rules or rhythms. Play and learning are closely related in early childhood. But when the focus on the educational benefits of play becomes too strong, the most essential feature of play is lost: children’s pleasure. Young children in group settings often have to adapt to the teachers’ demands related to security, hygiene, and social norms and values. But the playfulness of the teachers helps to overcome differences in power in the caregiver-child relationship and prevents young children from becoming overburdened with strict rules and group discipline. Play and playfulness are a resource of shared pleasure and creativity in learning processes.