Background. Fatigue is the most common complaint by children both during and after cancer treatment, but in Russia, there is no reliable method for assessing fatigue. 

Objective. To develop a Russian version of the Turkish Scale for the Assessment of Fatigue in Pediatric Oncology Patients Ages 7-18.

Design. Our first step was to translate all the items of the Turkish questionnaire into Russian. Then, through discussion, we created a single proposition for each item. The next step was obtaining expert opinions to assess the validity. Once the expert estimates agreed, a pilot version of the questionnaire was formed. The next step was to collect a large sample of patients to study the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. 

Results. As a result of factor analysis, three factors were identified. The first factor was "fatigue associated with actions;" the second was "fatigue as feeling;" and the third was "fatigue associated with sleep difficulties." The children's and parents’ versions had the same factor structure. 

Conclusion. This study showed the possibility of using the questionnaire in a Russian sample. That’s why it is necessary to continue collecting and analyzing data in this direction. The reliability of the test was also assessed. The reliability of the parent version scored a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.91. The reliability of the children’s version showed a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.93.

Background. In European countries, postpartum depression (PPD) occurs in 13–19% of women. The statistics indicate that postpartum depressive disorders affect up to 300,000 women in Russia annually. There is still an extremely acute lack of psychological comfort provided to women during labor in Russia. 

Objective. To our knowledge, ours is the first study that examines the association between childbirth experience and the risk of PPD in Russia.

Design. We collected data from 190 Russian-speaking mothers, ages 19 to 46, (M = 32 +4.3) two months after their delivery. 

Results. Birth satisfaction and physical well-being two months after delivery were significantly inversely associated with PPD. Birth satisfaction negatively correlated with the perceived severity and unpredictability of labor, and positively correlated with physical well-being two months after delivery. The presence of a partner and a personal midwife or doula at birth was associated with higher birth satisfaction. 

Conclusion. Our results emphasize the significance of childbirth satisfaction in the context of PPD and suggest the importance of individual professional support during labor.

Background. At the beginning of 20^thcentury, the phenomenon of oddity began to be studied. It was defined as a set of characteristics responsible for an individual giving the impression of being unusual, odd, and peculiar. Later, psychiatrists integrated oddity into the concept of schizotypy. Yet, while considered a part of the schizotypy construct, oddity has remained singular  and maintained its status as an independent dimension.

Objective.The present article discusses oddity as a set of particular clinical traits that can be evaluated both by self-report measures and clinical assessment. We  set out to investigate the oddity phenomena as manifested in a clinical sample, in order to delineate key features that constitute this concept.

Design. Seventy-one patients were selected according to a specific set of criteria and subjected to a set of self-report measures (the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and the Adult Personality Traits Questionnaire), a clinical interview, and a pathopsychological experiment. A number of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional characteristics were analyzed. An intra-group comparison was carried out in order to clarify the potential differences between the self-reported and clinically assessed phenomenon of oddity.

Results. The study’s first finding was that the SPQ-74 does not identify odd personalities in the general population, as reflected in the fact that the sample’s average scores proved to be low. Secondly, restricted emotionality and a deficit in social interactions proved to be the prevalent characteristics of the sample of “odd” individuals. Furthermore, a set of certain speech peculiarities (word coinage, bizarrerie, etc.) and thinking impairments of various types (distortion of abstraction level and motivational deficit) emerged as prominent characteristics in the majority of subjects. Finally, it was determined that clinical assessment allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of the psychology of odd personalities than self-report measures, due to a number of the personality, temperamental, and cognitive characteristics that the latter tend to exhibit.

Conclusion. “Odd” individuals can be characterized by a number of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral features independent of social perception and relevant to clinical practice; they can be captured more successfully by the application of qualitative methods. Further research is needed to elaborate this set of traits and test this hypothesis on new samples.

Background. This article is devoted to the problem of excessively rigid behavior, which the author has named “fixed forms of behavior” (FFB). This term was suggested to me by the concepts of P. Janet (idéefixe), S. Freud (Fixierung), and D. Uznadze (fiksirovanaya ustanovka– fixed set/attitude). By FFB, the author understands a broad spectrum of behaviors of a person or a group of people, which, according to the cultural norms of a given society for persons of a certain age, gender, and status,have become inappropriate, yet are repeated in situations objectively requiring that they change; the degree of realization and acceptance of the need for this change can vary.

Results. Through literature analysis and the collection of experimental data over many years of research, in which over 1,150 persons took part – 550 healthy subjects and 600 mental patients from a broad spectrum – and on the basis of a biopsychosocionoetic model of the nature of man and his health, and a system-network approach, it has become possible to distinguish the following models to explain the nature of fixed forms of behavior: neurodynamic, energy-economic, phylogenetic, person-environment relationship, dispositional, stressogenic, pathogenic, psychodynamic, learning (behavioral-cognitive), system (an excessively rigid system and structural relations between levels of action).

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 chapter explains the strategy for the sociocultural reform of education as a socialization institution that plays a key role in the focused development of value systems, standards, paradigms, and behavioral patterns in the population of Russia. The author reveals the role education plays in modeling such phenomena of social development as the social consolidation of society, the civil identity of representatives of various social groups and national cultures, the encouragement of social confidence, the successful socialization of oncoming generations, and the social stratification of the population of Russia. This chapter also considers the benefits of the sociocultural reform of education as a growth driver for the competitive strength of the individual, the society, and the state and for the further design of long-term programs for the social and economic development of Russia, including the federal education-development program.

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.