Natalia V. Grishina

Background. COVID-19 has revealed the diversity of cultural characteristics and mentalities of different countries: every people living through the pandemic interprets the means of overcoming the crisis in their own way, in accordance with their historical experience and cultural traditions. 

Objective. The purpose of this study  (April 2 - May 2, 2020) was to identify the influence of cultural factors and the context of residence (living in their own country or in another culture as a migrant) on how people perceive and experience a pandemic.

Design. The study involved 605 people: 402 Russian-speaking respondents (221 migrants living outside their countries) and 203 representatives of other cultures (165 Spaniards and 38 migrants from different countries).The main research method was a survey using a specially prepared questionnaire (in four languages ​​ – Spanish, English, German, and Russian). 

Results. Cultural factors had a strong influence on how a people experienced a pandemic. Respondents from European and other cultures (non Russian speakers) were very intolerant of dissent in the fight against the pandemic; showed an increase in patriotism; and demonstrated increased readiness for an operational response to the situation through a change of activity. Russian-speaking respondents showed great loyalty to different positions and different behaviors during pandemic situation; expressed the desire to wait out the pandemic and quickly return to their usual way of life; their main preventive measure was self-isolation, which was considered an opportunity for the development of something new.  The perception of a pandemic by migrants differed from its perception by the indigenous population. 

Conclusion. Common to all representatives of the international sample were the ideas of necessary international cooperation and universal responsibility to overcome the pandemic. But the cultural factors and having a migrant’s status had a strong influence on the perception and experience of the pandemic, which depends on the mentality and historical experience in different countries.   

Background. In psychology, analyzing the problem of personality is closely connected with the search for a methodology to describe personality in all its diversity. The dispositional approach, which is based on identifying stable personality traits, has resulted today in the dominance of a structural-functional approach. It has the advantage that it allows comparative analysis and the juxtaposition of specific personality characteristics inherent in the underlying construct, but it also has the limitation that it is inadequate for the study of personality as a dynamic structure, one capable of changing as the world around it changes.

Objective. To analyze and systematize the empirical studies of recent years in the field of personality psychology in order to identify and describe the principal trends in the study of the phenomenology of personality, reflecting distinctive features of human existence in the modern world.

Design. The method of research included a meta-analysis of reports (N = 1,149) from three European conferences on personality: the 17th European Conference on Personality (2014), Lausanne, Switzerland; the 18th European Conference on Personality (2016), Romania; the 19th European Conference on Personality (2018), Zadar, Croatia. We also describe the changeability of personality characteristics in the context of the individual’s life, on the basis of meta-analytical databases compiled by Roberts et al. (2006) and Wrzus et al. (2016).

Results. The results demonstrate the continuing domination of structural methodology in empirical studies of personality, despite the criticism to which it has been subjected. However, the number of studies of various aspects of dynamic personality processes is growing. Research reflecting the phenomenology of everyday life is expanding, as studies of daily human behavior, life events, and life situations are increasing proportionally. Researchers’ attention is being drawn to diverse contexts of life: the environment, culture, relationships. Data collection technologies are changing: Digital devices enable information about personality to be obtained online, tracking all the diversity of personality in different situations, its changeability and dynamism. Metadata indicate the changeability of personality traits that have long been considered stable: extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness. The dynamics of personality traits are essentially determined by the context of a person’s life and vary depending on changes in that life. The continuity of these changes is processual and does not fit into the structural approach.

Conclusion. Modern personality psychology has contradictory trends. On the one hand, especially in empirical research, the traditional structural-functional paradigm for describing the personality remains influential, while attempts are made to improve it in response to criticism. On the other hand, an increasing number of studies are devoted to the study of real people in the real world, confronting the challenges of a changing world. A growing amount of empirical data describing the dynamic personality, changing in time and space, necessitates theoretical understanding and the search for a methodology relevant to the study of the changing personality.

Considering today’s abundance of psychology books, from reprints of timeless classic works through scholarly editions to popular literature, it is hard to expect a new book to become a big event in psychology. However, a book entitled The Phenomenon of Envy is hard to overlook: as observed by the author, very few people are unaffected by envy. Besides, the name of the author, Aleksander I. Dontsov, former head of the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University and of the Russian Psychological Society, is well known among Russian scholars.