Articles

Russian psychology which had been cut off from the world science for the greater part of the 20th century is now facing a challenge to join the international mainstream. To facilitate the integration of Russian psychology into the international mainstream, a certain hermeneutics is needed, applied to the explicit methodology and terminology Russian scientists used, as well as to the system of implicit beliefs and assumptions concerning human nature "embedded" into the Russian psychology. The latter is compared to its counterparts in major Western psychological theories.

Today, the media are often blamed for having a harmful influence on the moral, psychological, psychosexual, and social development of people. Indignant mothers, polemicists from politics and social fields, spiritual leaders, psychologists, and even researchers of the media attribute to the mass media truly horrific effects, such as the demoralization, perversion, and spiritual impoverishment of their audiences. The most blamed medium is television. Nowadays, television is considered to be the root of evil. The author tries to understand how justified such reproaches to the media are.

This article examines the influence of the mass media and in particular television on the development of the values of pluralism and cultural diversity in children. The role of television is quite important in forming positive attitudes toward cultural, ethnic, and other groups and in inculcating an adequate perception of social reality and tolerant, multicultural awareness. The article also analyzes the functions and principles of public broadcasting, among which diversity of programming is one of the most significant.

The feminization of journalism, a process taking place in numerous countries worldwide, has been advancing at a much higher rate in Russia than elsewhere. This trend is based on both global and specifically Russian factors. The gradual migration of journalism from being a typically male profession to being a predominantly female one brings about a number of inner transformations and creates a certain inner psychological climate. To fully understand these changes, researchers should set new goals for their studies based on an analysis of gender transformations in journalism and on investigations of possible problems and conflicts entailed in the process.

The mass media have become one of the crucial institutions of modern society; it is hard to overestimate their role in the formation of people’s beliefs, values, and physiological characteristics. The media industries are now an integral part of the leisure and entertainment industries. With free time becoming a key economic resource of society, the individual lives and psychological well-being of people are significantly influenced by the processes of mass communication and by media companies; this level of influence results in the emergence of a new human being—homo mediatis.

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.

Over the last decade, the problem of young people's health has been among the most important and complicated ones for Russian society; these problems affect not only young children but also students in higher education institutions. The low level of physical and psychological health of young people has become an alarming characteristic of the demographic situation in modern Russia.

This study was carried out at the State University of St. Petersburg, which is one of the largest higher education institutions in Russia. The university consists of many academic departments, and thus it is possible to study the health-related behavior of students with different professional backgrounds.

The results show that drug use among students in Russia still remains relatively rare and episodic; in most cases, students use "light" drugs and thus have both slow rates of developing an addiction and an alternative but successful socialization in modern youth subculture. Such drugs are also not generally associated with significant health risks.

Research was carried out to explore coping strategies in cancer patients. In all, 70 women with breast cancer were studied: 35 of them had visible postsurgery deformity, and 35 did not have visible postsurgery deformity. The purpose of the research was to uncover their preferences for using various strategies and resources to cope with their illness. The results showed that both groups of women had a special set of strategies for coping with stress. The women with visible postsurgery deformity made significantly less use of resources for coping with their illness than did the subgroup of women without visible postsurgery deformity.

The author discusses sources for, problems in, and ways of forming a hierarchical model of the development of whole affective behavioral complexes, not just mechanisms of emotional regulation, as was done in the original level-based model elaborated by Victor Lebedinsky. The author describes specific traits of affective behavioral complexes and types of links between them on different levels. Primitive affective behavioral complexes, either isolated or rigidly linked, dominate on the lower three levels. On the fourth level attachment behavior plays a “star” role, mediating and regulating all vital behaviors. On the fifth level symbolic activity permanently rebuilds the experience obtained on the lower levels. The author discusses links between affective behavioral complexes and nuclear personality formations.

The article describes various aspects of symbolic mediation and is aimed at showing its specificity. The author views a situation of uncertainty as a structural element of a symbol and introduces the notion of a symbol being a special tool for orientation in such situations. On the one hand, a symbol is contrasted to a sign, and on the other, is regarded as a transitional form in the process of its mastering. Author pays special attention to understanding the role of symbol in connection with understanding of play and its role in child’s development. Emotional and cognitive functions of symbol are defined and illustrated by examples.

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.

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.

Over the past several years, the possibilities for Russia’s economic growth have been discussed widely. This problem is unquestionably topical. However, do material factors alone determine the well-being of a society and its people? Since the mid-1980s, the overwhelming majority of indicators of the psychological state of Russian society have been demonstrating a negative tendency, and this trend not only reflects on the citizens’ sense of self but also creates obstacles on the way to the country’s innovative development.

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.

Participants in Experiment 1 completed a 36-item life events inventory (LEI) in their native language (Russian) two separate times, over a 1-week period. Between the two LEIs, participants got 12 items translated from Russian into English and 12 items in Russian. They performed a series of English-language exercises on translated items and Russian-language exercises on non-translated items. After performing exercises on items translated from Russian into English participants increased their confidence that these life events had occurred in their personal past. There was no similar effect for nontranslated items and for control items. Experiment 2 was run to examine if two factors - a change in linguistic context and a change in level of abstraction taken together boosted the effect. Participants completed a 24-item LEI in Russian two separate times, over a 1 -week period. Between the two LEIs, participants got 12 of these life events at the higher level of abstraction (e.g., "Got lost in a shopping mall" or "found yourself at an unfamiliar public place") translated from Russian into English. Participants translated the event from English into Russian and wrote a sentence using the gist of the item. After performing language exercises on items at the higher level of abstraction participants increased their confidence that these life events had occurred in their personal past. The magnitude of effect was almost twice bigger than in Experiment 1. These results indicate that a change in linguistic context can produce imagination inflation. We discuss our findings in terms of familiarity misattribution, whereby processing fluency is experienced as familiarity and misattributed to autobiographical memory.

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.

The psychological component of terrorism in four major attitudes is considered in the article: psychology of terrorism, psychology of counteraction to terrorism, psychological training of experts and the psychological help to victims of terrorism. Socio-psychological factors of development of terrorism, including concept of "contributing events" as well as hypothesis "frustration-aggression" are investigated. Specific features and the external factors promoting involving into terrorism are analyzed. The system of measures of counteraction of transformation of groups of risk is presented to the potential terrorist organizations, including in aspect of the control over ideology, education, education and work of mass media. Features of work with victims of acts of terrorism and extreme situations, minimization of its negative consequences are made out. Psychological reactions of the experts, engaged by liquidation of consequences of actions of terrorism, resulting works with victims of extreme situations are revealed. Features of vocational training of the personnel working with victims of terrorism and extreme situations are specified. Ways of overcoming of the negative psychological consequences arising at experts as a result of long contact to victims of extreme situations are presented.

This article looks at the main symptoms of the crisis in psychology. The author believes that in addition to the traditional manifestations that have dogged psychology since it emerged as an independent science, there have appeared some new symptoms. The author identifies three fundamental "ruptures": "vertical" ruptures between various schools and trends, "horizontal" ruptures between natural science and humanitarian psychology and "diagonal" ruptures between research (academic) and practical psychology. In the author's opinion, these manifestations of the crisis of psychology have recently been compounded by the crisis of its rationalistic foundations.

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.

Yury P. Zinchenko – President of the RPS, Doctor of Psychological Science, Professor,
Dean of the Faculty of Psychology, Lomonosov Moscow State University
(international activity, executive duties, growth policy).
E-mail: zinchenko@psy.msu.ru.
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