Vol 45, No 3 (2024)

The relevance of the problem of scientific traditions and continuity of psychological knowledge as an important issue in the methodology of modern psychology is considered and substantiated. An analysis of the definitions and understanding of the term “tradition” in the developments of psychologists and related specialists is given, the main difficulties in deployment of research in this area and their problem field are outlined. The paradoxical nature in the study of traditions is indicated — the recognition of its relevance and importance for understanding the dynamics of psychological knowledge, as well as fixation of the need for development and, at the same time, a small number of modern special publications on this topic. Often publications that use the term “tradition” in their titles characterize it only indirectly and rather generally, and sometimes imply a completely different phenomenon under study. It is concluded that the problems of traditions in Russian psychology mostly have the character of unexpressed, unreflected knowledge.

The emotional attitude towards outgroup representatives may differ depending on the target of discrimination. Establishing the role of emotional relationships and the motivation of dislike in adherence to certain combined types of discriminatory attitudes will contribute to the development of measures to counteract them. The aim of the study is to establish emotional attitudes towards representatives of outgroups and the motives of dislike, which are predictors of discriminatory attitudes. The study involved 190 people of both sexes (men — 36.6%), aged 20–40 years. The survey methods of direct and indirect assessment of discriminatory attitudes, affective reactions towards representatives of discriminated groups, motives of dislike, methods of mathematical data processing (descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analyses, modeling method) were used. The combination of forms of emotional attitude and motivation in the prediction of types of discriminatory attitudes, as well as direct and indirect effects of emotional relationships on generalized forms of discriminatory attitudes, has been revealed. Anger and anxiety act as emotional attitudes towards representatives of outgroups, causing a general discriminatory attitude, while interest and disgust contribute to its reduction. The predictors of discriminatory attitudes towards socially vulnerable groups are fear (positive), interest and pity (negative); dissident groups — anger and fear; outsider groups — anger and disgust; social status groups — irritation and aggression (positive), disgust and interest (negative). The strongest motivational predictors of discriminatory attitudes are the motivation of competition in the labor market in the case of dissident, socially-status and even socially unprotected groups, as well as hostility based on an emotional attitude in the case of dissident and socially-outsider groups. Various emotional attitudes and motivations of rejection towards outgroup representatives explain a significant part of the dispersion of generalized forms of discriminatory attitudes. Generalized discriminatory attitudes are characterized by heterogeneous emotional conditioning and polymotivation.

The article presents the results of a study of the development of mental regulation of students’ psychological states during their studies at a university. This work is based on authors’ conceptual model of the structural and functional organization of psychological states’ mental regulation. The study was carried out at the initial and final stages of students’ education in everyday and stressful situations of academic activity covering the period from 2019 to 2023. Methods and effectiveness of psychological state self-regulation were studied using well-known valid methods and specially designed questionnaires. Mental structures such as reflection, life meaning orientation, and self-system, as well as individual regulatory properties studied outside educational situations in first (2018) and fourth years (2022) of study were investigated. As a result of the study, it was established, that, regardless of the situation of educational activity, psychological states acquire greater stability (equilibrium) by the senior year of study, which is associated with the effectiveness of states’ self-regulation. Changes in mental structures from the initial course to the final of study are revealed in an increase in the intensity of their manifestations in all main indicators. It has been established that in both situations, during the learning process, students experience an increase in the involvement of mental structures (primarily reflexive) and regulatory properties in the regulation of psychological states. In each situation of educational activity and at each stage of training, there were identified the leading structures of consciousness, determining the choice of self-regulation methods, which, in turn, are associated with the substructures of psychological states. It has been also stablished that from the initial stage of study to the final one, there is an increase in the number of methods used for states’ self-regulation, as well as their relationships with mental structures and regulatory properties of the personality, which indicates the development of a system of mental regulation of students’ psychological states.

Based on an analysis of the diversity of individual psychological characteristics of students, a concept of “individual characteristics of learning” (ICL) has been characterized. A review of various publications revealed a discrepancy between the large amount of empirical data on student ICLs and the lack of a systematic, stable, and theoretically justified typology. The high variability of identified types under different conditions and circumstances makes it difficult to differentiate one type from another and ensures its reproducibility. This raises questions about the feasibility of creating a scientifically sound practice of individualizing and differentiating learning. The aim of this study is to determine the main reasons for the failure of existing typologies and to create a stable typology of ICL. The hypothesis is put forward that the typologization of students’ ICL based on generalization and categorization of the external manifestations of mental activity cannot be consistent without taking into account internal psychological patterns and dynamic interaction of factors that cause these manifestations in certain conditions of learning activity. To test this hypothesis, several well-known typologies were analyzed, their main shortcomings identified, and conclusions drawn. It was concluded that the true typology of ICL should be based not on similarity in their external manifestations but on similarity of internal psychological patterns determining their manifestation and development.

The Dark Tetrad refers to the combination of four non-clinical traits: machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. These traits are associated with a lack of empathy, a tendency to disregard ethical issues, and a flexible approach to moral principles. The moral disengagement of responsibility involves defense mechanisms that facilitate the process of making callous and unethical judgments. The ongoing research aims to enhance our comprehension of how negative personality traits contribute to morally reprehensible behavior by investigating the role of dark tetrad features in combination with mechanisms of moral disengagement. The study aimed to investigate the connections between Dark Tetrad traits and the mechanisms of moral disengagement, as well as their collective impact on utilitarian decision-making. The hypothesis suggested that machiavellianism and psychopathy would exhibit the most significant correlations with moral disengagement mechanisms. Additionally, it was anticipated that when combined with sadism and moral disengagement mechanisms, these traits would result in the highest predictive capacity in a regression model for utilitarian decisions. The survey involved a sample of 500 participants, specifically students aged 18 to 26, 73.2% women. The study was conducted online. The study utilized the Short Dark Tetrad Questionnaire, a shortened version of the MD-8 Moral Disengagement Scale, and moral dilemmas from the Moral Sense Test. It aimed to explore the relationships between machiavellianism, psychopathy, and non-clinical sadism, as well as the mechanisms of moral disengagement and the inclination to reach utilitarian conclusions in moral dilemmas. The study revealed that machiavellianism, sadism, and the tendency to attribute blame are important factors that contribute to the widespread acceptance of utilitarian decision-making. The acceptability of making a utilitarian judgment using different combinations of moral principles (such as action, intent to cause harm, and contact with the victim) demonstrated the impact of narcissism. When making a utilitarian decision in a dilemma where direct harm is caused to the victim, a prediction model can be created using a combination of sadism, attribution of blame, and younger age. Individuals who display a strong presence of the Dark Tetrad traits, namely machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism, are inclined to make utilitarian decisions. Additionally, they use various methods to disengage themselves from moral responsibility. One such method involves shifting the blame onto the victim and attributing guilt to them.

The connection between the parts of the human body and the formation of their phobic plot in men and women is investigated. The methodology of the work was based on a secondary analysis of the results of conducted and published studies on existing objects (the human body and its parts) of phobias. 57 parts of the human body were identified, on which men and women form FTD, of which 15 objects of fear in the group of men cause persistent FT, and in women — 40 objects of fear determine the appearance of phobias and their formation. In men, the greatest fear is caused by the female psyche, and the blush on the face and female ears are the least. In women, the unattractiveness of the face, ugliness, various bodily and facial defects, deformed body, wrinkles and teeth provoke the deepest phobic disorder. As a conclusion, it is concluded that this type of phobias in terms of frequency of development and comorbidity prevails in the group of women who suffer from it more often.

There are practically no studies devoted to aesthetic experience in the Russian psychological literature; this may be due to the lack of techniques by which aesthetic judgments, emotions, and meanings — the key components of aesthetic experience — can be measured. The purpose of the study is to approbate the Aesthetic Emotions Scale (AESTHEMOS) on a Russian-speaking sample. The approbation of the AESTHEMOS was carried out in accordance with modern psychometric standards. The methods of parallel and exploratory factor analysis, as well as structural equation modeling, were used to assess structural validity; correlation analysis was used to assess convergent and divergent validity; and the Ferguson coefficient in the Hankins modification was used to assess discriminativity. A sample consists of 473 people (М_age = 23.4; SD = 4.9; Me = 22), of whom 327 are women and 146 are men, 40% of whom have been pursuing an undergraduate degree and 60% have already obtained at least one at the time of approbation. The sample was gathered from May to June 2023, near the various Moscow cultural centers. In the study, the following psychodiagnostics tools were used: Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire Short Form (TEIQue-SF), Engagement With Beauty Scale (EBS 2.0), Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI), Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM), and Aesthetic Judgments Scale. The results showed that the AESTHEMOS has good psychometric properties: all the scales have a normal distribution and high consistency of points within the scales (Cronbach’s alpha ≥ 0.70). The AESTHEMOS has a high level of discrimination. Δ_G = 0.99. The Russian-language version of the AESTHEMOS has constructive validity: the results showed that the AESTHEMOS has a seven-factor structure formed by 21 facets and good psychometric properties, which correspond to the original version (N = 243, χ²/df = 1.90, CFI = 0.965, RMSEA = 0.061). The results of the correlation analysis allowed us to conclude that the AESTHEMOS has convergent and divergent validity.

The article is dedicated to the 100^th anniversary of the Russian engineering psychologist Anatoly Ivanovich Galaktionov (1924–1996). The life path of a scientist is described. The works of A.I. Galaktionov are discussed in a number of areas of his research in the field of engineering psychology: development of a conceptual model of professional activity; research into the psychological structure of activity; engineering-psychological design of control systems and information display. It is concluded that in the conditions of the modern technological paradigm, his concept of a multi-level structure of a conceptual model of activity deserves the closest attention of developers of systems of various levels and purposes.

Within the framework of scientific discourse, the article occupies a central place in the construction and dissemination of knowledge in the scientific community. At the same time, collaborative authorship is becoming increasingly widespread in the scientific community. The syntactic and semantic differences between the texts of collaborations and individual authors present an urgent problem and remain poorly understood. This determines the purpose of the study — to identify differences in the structure of scientific discourse with individual and collaborative authorship of publications. At the preliminary stage of the study, an unstructured research interview was conducted on the specifics of writing scientific articles individually and as part of author teams. The main research is devoted to the analysis of the semantic and syntactic structure of texts using the method of relational situational analysis (RSA), which allows you to automatically identify the correspondence of the syntaxemic structure of a sentence to the logical structure of the actions described in this sentence. The study compared the texts of 201 scientific articles in Russian from the leading psychological journals included in WoS and Scopus, divided into corpora by type of authorship (individual-collaborative) and genres (theoretical articles and reviews vs empirical methodological articles). During the study, it was revealed that the articles written in collaboration have higher lexical coherence, they are more syntactically correct. The volume of the text of a scientific article on psychology is on average 9% more with individual authorship compared with collaborative writing. The semantic and syntactic differences between the texts of articles by individual authors and collaborations have a genre differentiation. In theoretical articles and reviews of collaborations, the syntactic complexity and semantic coherence of the text are higher, the traditional structure of the statement prevails: the thesis is briefly postulated and then fully justified. With individual authorship, the main idea is more often formulated after the context, while reformulation is more often used in the texts of individual authors. The meta-discourse in theoretical articles also differs significantly: the author’s position is more represented by individual authors, and “reader involvement” is in the case of co-authorship. In empirical and methodological articles, the main differences are revealed in the specifics of meta-discourse: the author’s position, unlike the genre of theoretical articles, is more inherent in the texts of collaborations.

The work is devoted to the analysis of the collection of works “Soviet psychology: the stage of the history of science and mentality” // Responsible. ed. A.L. Zhuravlev, D.V. Ushakov, A.V. Yurevich. Moscow: Publishing house “Institute of Psychology RAS”, 2024. The main ideas presented in 21 articles of this book are highlighted. By studying a retrospective analysis of the works, seven main lessons for modern psychology are formulated, allowing us to see the significance of the Soviet period for the development of science. The first lesson is that despite the ideological pressure and attempts to unify psychology, it implemented the principles of postmodernity and metamodernity, characteristic of modern methodology, with great anticipation. Many ideas and theories were ahead of their time and are relevant and are still being developed today. Lesson two is the formation of psychology as a recognized scientific discipline, which was institutionalized, organized, and acquired a qualifying status. The third lesson teaches us that the space of scientific psychology must be restored: the gaps are closed by the discovery of forgotten names, their achievements and their contribution to the development of scientific thought are analyzed. The development and solution of scientific problems in psychology is rooted in the Soviet period, determining the continuity of scientific knowledge — this is the fourth lesson. The fifth lesson shows us that applied psychology developed intensively during the Soviet period and many of its achievements remain relevant today. The sixth lesson follows from an analysis of the psychology of Soviet people. A real, balanced analysis points to the ambivalence of the characteristics of Soviet people, the limitations of their economic mentality, the presence of double morality, denunciations, and fear of power. Finally, the modern psychological community should not forget what price many scientists paid for their beliefs, what destruction of entire directions in psychology was experienced. The Soviet period of development of Russian psychology is more diverse and ambiguous than previously imagined. The completed project of analyzing the Soviet period of psychology from the perspective of modern science showed its high efficiency and promise. Filling the gaps in the history of Russian psychology is not only fundamental for science, but it is also a moral duty to the generation of Soviet scientists.