Petrenko, V.F.

The release of this year's volume of Psychology in Russia: State of the Art is timed to the 30th International Congress of Psychology, that is hosted by South African Cape Town on July 22 this year, as the Russian Psychological Society as an official member of the European Federation of Psychological Associations, as well as the International Union of Psychological Science under UNESCO pays great attention to the current state of the psychological science around the world. It is precisely with this spirit of openness and shared knowledge that the society regularly publishes scientific research and participates in various forums, conferences and round-table discussions...

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.

Authors discuss notable philosophical and psychological aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as different features of meditation techniques in their relations to psychological study of consciousness.

This article concerns studies devoted to the analysis of stereotypes of women's behavior using a method of plural identification. This method has developed within the general psychosemantic approach and allows to study not only well realized social and mental representations, but those deep and implicit, too. The article describes three experiments. All of them are cross-cultural. In the first and the second experiments attitudes of Russian and Azerbaijan respondents were compared. The third experiment is focused on comparing the feedback received from Russian and US samples. It has been shown that cultural influence is more important than gender influence when we deal with attitudes towards female behavior and life scenarios. That means that positions of men and women of the same culture have more in common than responses pf women or men from different cultures. The method permits to conduct cross-cultural researches into different (subcultures both in one country or in different countries.

This third issue of the yearbook Psychology in Russia: State of the Art is timed for the XXVIIth International Congress of Applied Psychology (11th-16th July 2010, Melbourne, Australia). The aim of the issue is to acquaint foreign colleagues with a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied research conducted by Russian psychologists in the last few years. Russian psychology is developing intensively today. To a very large extent this is determined by the great interest Russian society shows for psychology in general and for the possibilities of its practical application. An ever increasing number of organizations employ professional psychologists in Russia, and there is an ever increasing demand for scientifically sound innovations in management, production, education, and entertainment. In the last years, the quantity of popular psychology books has been steadily increasing, which is an unequivocal evidence for a rising concern of the Russian population with psychological issues. Although Russian psychology always was interested in solving applied problems, the dominance of applied research can today be regarded as one of its most characteristic features.

The year which passed since the last issue of this yearbook was published was marked by a considerable amount of activity by the professional community of Russian psychologists. This clearly reflects the growing role psychology as a discipline and a profession plays in the life of Russian society. Today, psychology has become very visible in Russia. It has made a miraculous transformation from a rather exotic – if not marginal – academic discipline to almost a mass occupation. The need for all sorts of psychological services (be it psychological help, consulting, or applied research) surely still exceeds the capabilities of the professional community of Russian psychologists. This imbalance creates many pressures for professional psychologists to weaken quality standards they follow in their day-to-day work and to trade scientifically sound psychological theories for ad-hoc invented explanations and questionable hypotheses. It is with content that the Russian Psychological Society (RPS) observes a re-orientation of psychologists in universities and in practice towards an increasing sensitivity to the use of scientifically validated methods and procedures. More importantly, Russian consumers of psychological services today oft en ask not for a quick remedy of a single problem, but are interested in a thorough analysis of the problem at hand in order to develop an integrated solution with a predictable chance of success.

Stating the main principles of Buddhist philosophy and psychology is usually going with help of ancient categories and metaphors, which had been developed since the fifth century B.C. till the tenth century A.C. That means they were worked out by quite different kind of mentality (culture, language, traditions…). That makes those categories and metaphors almost untranslatable on European languages properly and unequivocally. In its turn, that situation makes difficult any kind of modern scientific research of the phenomena, discovered inside Buddhism, as well as ideas, developed in it. In this article we set a question of possibility to select such basic concepts of modern natural science, which can effectively translate main oriental ideas about Reality into modern scientific paradigm and discover the meaning of psychological phenomena from the transpersonal psychology sphere of interest. We take a look on some comparisons between pictures of Reality in modern physics and in Buddhist paradigm, allocating two sides of Reality, called Nirvana and Samsara.

This article describes a categorical structure of perception of still-life painting. Analysis is done on the system of visual opposition elements in still-life. A still-life is considered a “perceptual statement about the world”, and a “visual aphorism”. The research is based on such methods as: semantic spaces constructing and their transformation at introduction of additional elements in still-lifes. It also gives full analysis of an interpretation of complex images and understanding of types of still-life as a visual hermeneutics.

This volume contains articles of Russian psychologists and is dedicated to the 11th European Congress of Psychology, which is held in July 2009, in Oslo, Norway. The main purpose of this edition is to introduce Russian contemporary psychology to international psychological community. The team of contributors occurred to be rather accidental. Most of them are psychologists who decided to participate in the Congress in Oslo and received travel grants from one of the national academic foundations: the Russian Foundation of Basic Research and the Russian Foundation for Humanities. A wish to participate in the European Congress, the financial support of the academic foundations and a manuscript in English, – these were the conditions of membership in this project. Such an occasional cast has both positive and negative aspects.

This article discusses an application of psychosemantic methods for the analysis of viewer understanding. As an example, the movie “Sibirskiy Tsiryulnik” (“The Barber of Siberia”, directed by a famous politician N. M ikhalkov) is taken, where Russian and American mentalities are juxtaposed. Basing on the works by M. Bakhtin and G. Kelly the concept of “art construct” is introduced. For the construction of semantic spaces of film perception the method of attribution of motives to film characters’ deeds was elaborated and used with the G. Kelly’s triadic method, followed by factor analysis.

The present volume collects some examples of scientific work done by contemporary Russian psychologists, both empirical and theoretical, in different directions of research. Russian psychology in its development has undergone various times, some of them could be characterized as significant intensity of research, some could be described as essential decrease in volume of the leaded development. Those changes were mostly determined by the external reasons: political revolutions of the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, two World wars, which have influenced all areas of Russian life, economic and political shocks of the first half and the end of the same century, ideological restrictions (during the Soviet period) that were imposed on studied problems and treatment of the results of those studies, and also in the form of significant reduction of communication between the Russian and world psychology, etc.

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.