Vol 45, No 5 (2024)

The center of L.I. Antsyferova scientific interests was always the personality problem. The article discusses one of the fundamental principles of her approach — the idea of personal wholeness. Antsyferova’s methodology is based on the implementing the ideas of a processual-dynamic approach in the field of personality psychology. It is the dynamic characteristics of the personality, in her opinion, that ensure the variability and development. One of her fundamentals is the idea of personality as a continuously developing wholeness. The novelty of her approach is associated with the understanding wholeness as not just a mechanism for maintaining integration, but also as developing and “finishing” itself to a new level of integrity. Based on the analysis of the provisions of Antsyferova’s dynamic approach, the article outlines the theoretical and methodological foundations for a research approach to studying wholeness. Personal wholeness is considered to be maintaining a certain balance between interacting tendencies toward stability and variability in personality. At the same time, different “orders” of wholeness (degrees of dynamic unity) are allowed, ranging from “higher order” wholeness processes that reflect the fundamental nature of personality to “partial” levels of wholeness related to subsystems and psychological formations at different contextual levels. Maintaining the individual’s wholeness in the face of variability is the pursuit of a new system-forming foundation. The proposed theoretical framework for describing wholeness enables us to identify possible approaches for its empirical study.

The agent concept of the personal authenticity considering it personality trait that ensures a person’s fidelity to their nature, spatial and temporal circumstances of life, and calling, is systematically presented. The two main functions of authenticity, transcendental and adaptive, contribute to maintaining prosocial (including moral) attitudes and psychological well-being. The agent concept is presented in seven positions and verified empirically. The correlation study involved 430 respondents aged 17 to 32 years (M_age = 19.20 ± 1.22), 88 men and 342 women. The indicators of general well-being, positive and negative affect, and moral motives were measured. Eight authenticity indicators representing three concepts were independent variables. Three hypotheses were tested: 1) Dispositional authenticity is positively associated with a person’s psychological well-being; 2) Dispositional authenticity is positively associated with a person’s moral motives; 3) Indicators of dispositional authenticity within different paradigms form different patterns of connections with well-being indicators and moral motives. All three hypotheses were confirmed (the second one — partially). The prediction of well-being is stronger compared with moral motives, and the indicator of the agent concept forms the largest number of connections, giving evidence for both adaptive and transcendental functions of authenticity.

In this article, we analyze the state-of-the-art in international research on comprehension of texts of new formats. We describe the concept of “multimedia text”, which is widely accepted in literature, as well as discuss its alternatives. Also, we thoroughly describe key theoretical models, such as the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and the Integrated Model of Text and Picture Comprehension, which are often employed in formulating and testing research hypotheses in this field. Furthermore, we offer a brief overview of meta-analytical studies in this area, which suggests a range of consistent effects (such as a positive impact of illustrations on text comprehension) as well as various external and internal factors influencing these effects (e.g., presence of visual navigation aids or level of a reader’s relevant background knowledge). Finally, we address some emerging research questions which should be tackled in future research. We also highlight the lack of such studies on Russian-language materials and conclude that introducing these questions into Russian psycholinguistics will be beneficial for advancing this field within the global scientific multilingual research context.

The article shows that specialists from various fields of science (philosophers, sociologists, educators, economists, psychologists, etc.) have been studying the problems of professionalism for many decades. In accordance with the psychological direction, “professionalism” is also operationalized within the framework of related theoretical directions (philosophical, social, axiological, acmeological, pedagogical, etc.). In the context of the conducted study, it is proposed to rely on a generalized (integrated) approach associated with the consideration of professionalism within the framework of a single complex socio-psychological model. The aim of the study was to analyze the structural and substantive elements of social network users’ ideas about professionalism. From a methodological point of view, personality ideas are considered as various substantive and structural elements that are organized into a single worldview concept. The work contains an automated (neural network) analysis of the most frequently repeated psychological statements about professionalism. The study showed that in the everyday consciousness of social network users, six main thematic concepts can be identified: activity, social environment, time, geography, economic factors, and choice of profession. According to the conscious/unconscious criterion, a number of significant components of professionalism are shown that are not reflected in the texts of users. A number of diverse, rarely used semantic constructs that require further study and systematization (for example, unique features of various professions) were also identified, the place and role of which are not yet clear enough, which suggests the need for further analysis of the problem.

Actions aimed at achievement of a desider outcome and at avoidance of an undesired one differ in behavioral measures and brain activity, even if these actions are outwardly similar. In our framework, functional systems that subserve behavior for achievement and avoidance are formed within two different domains of individual experience — those of approach and withdrawal — that provide different degrees of differentiation for interaction of individual with the environment. Based on the previously revealed relation between sample entropy of heart beats and the degree of differentiation, we recorded the heart rate of university students during the performance of two tasks on a computer. The tasks were presented in one of two sequences and in one of two motivational contexts for different groups. In accordance with the idea of greater differentiation of the avoidance domain and in correspondence with our previous results, the transfer effect is higher in the achievement context if the tasks are presented without a break. It has been shown that sample entropy differs between analytic and holistic participants, and this difference reflects their structure of experience. No differences were found in sample entropy between the contexts, presumably due to a more pronounced effect of its dynamics during task performance. Comparison of entropy in participants with different levels of individual traits showed that participants with analytical thinking, compared to holistic ones, perform part of one of the tasks faster, and their entropy during task performance starts growing from lower values. We interpret all the results in terms of the temporary decrease in differentiation at the initial stage of learning.

The article presents the scientific biography of Vilen Emmanuilovich Chudnovsky, the organizer of domestic research on the psychology of the meaning of life in the late 20th — early 21st centuries. From the position of his concept the problems of overcoming life stress in modern teenagers and young people are considered. Age characteristics of older teenagers and young people are defined as those most susceptible to crisis states and stress; views on the concepts of “stress” and “life stress” are presented; issues and forms of correction of stressful states in students are considered. The relevance of turning to the works of V.E. Chudnovsky, addressed to high school students, students and teachers, for solving life-meaning issues in the modern world is proved.

This article is a scientific-biographical essay dedicated to the analysis of the activities, human, and personal qualities of the renowned Soviet psychologist, cognitive scientist, representative of the Leningrad/Saint Petersburg school of psychology, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, Professor Tatyana Petrovna Zinchenko. The article highlights her extraordinary personal and human qualities and her pronounced pedagogical talent. It demonstrates her pioneering and foundational role in the creation and development of the theoretical-methodological and experimental basis of the Leningrad school of cognitive psychology, research on memory, perception, recognition, human information encoding, studies of perceptual interference processes, cognitive styles, and applied aspects of engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics. Research on this range of issues began and was conducted in the 1960s–1980s in the “Reception and Processing of Information” laboratory of the Faculty of Psychology at Leningrad State University. Under T.P. Zinchenko’s leadership, methods of tachistoscopic research were developed and widely used in educational and scientific-practical work, showing high effectiveness in the study of perception, attention, and memory processes. Tatyana Petrovna developed a structural-functional model of recognition, investigating its structure and connections with basic mental processes. Together with A.A. Frumkin in the mid-1990s, the first automated system of psychological support for activities was created and implemented in practice, including a battery of psychodiagnostics methods for professional selection based on computer technologies.

The article is devoted to the scientometric analysis of the scientific creativity of the prominent Russian psychologist A.V. Brushlinsky. A quantitative analysis of the corpus of A.V. Brushlinsky’s complete bibliography was carried out., divided into types of publications. The dynamics of his publication activity, the number and composition of co-authors have been established. Thematic analysis made it possible to identify the most frequent psychological terms and key phrases by periods of scientific creativity. The dynamics of citations of the scientist’s works was also examined, the most cited publications were identified, and a classification of citing publications was carried out according to institutional and content characteristics. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that the used set of scientometric methods and procedures made it possible to supplement the scientific biography of A.V. Brushlinsky with quantitative indicators of his activity and, thus, can be recommended for a comparative analysis of the work of individual scientists.

The relevance of the study of persistence is primarily since it belongs to the group of non-cognitive factors that determine academic achievement and success. Based on modern theoretical and methodological developments, a scale of persistence in academic activities was developed for students in grades 3–8 of secondary schools. The study was conducted on two samples of primary and secondary schoolchildren (N = 840, MA = 11.27, SD = 1.99). The scale evaluates academic persistence (grit), understood as a behavioral component of motivation for academic activity, manifested in such characteristics as persistence in learning, a tendency to finish what has been started, and a positive attitude towards effort. To test the validity of the new questionnaire, indicators of academic achievement, intrinsic and various types of extrinsic academic motivation, academic cheating, academic self-efficacy and well-being were used. The results of the analysis of psychometric properties, including CFA, show that the new persistence scale is characterized by acceptable indicators of internal consistency, a clear factor structure, a balanced composition, and compactness. Convincing evidence was obtained in favor of the validity of the scale, and the importance of perseverance for the academic performance (GPA) was demonstrated both for middle and primary school children. Age norm for students in grades 3–8 are provided, and the dynamics of perseverance from elementary to middle grades among students in public schools is shown. The proposed scale can be useful in further research when studying the role of persistence in academic achievements and its sources.