2005. vol. 2. No. 3

The author reviews the literature on the emotional dynamics in individual activity in the light of his own model, which involves four main parameters: positive and negative emotions, their balance and the level of emotional arousal (an integral characteristic). He draws hypothetical curves that show how these parameters change in connection with the efficacy of a normal activity (an activity of a person from the majority of the population, who acts under ordinary circumstances). These curves include the monotone descending curve for negative emotions, the bell‑shaped one for positive emotions, and two inverted J-shaped curves: one for the emotional balance with the upward tendency and the other for the integral parameter with downward tendency. The author argues that his model fits well into the existing data and discusses some difficulties that arise from working with the literature.

The article includes the recollections of professor Druzhinin's widow who describes how his scientific and poetic work emerged.

The author discusses the problem of the object of experimental research, an issue decisive for the basic characteristics of psychological knowledge.

The author discusses the work of the Russian psychologists, V.N. Druzhinin, who has recently passed away. He argues that Druzhinin's principal research topics were the actualisation and development of personal abilities — both constructive and destructive — together with the factors influencing the human potential. With this in view, the author considers Druzhinin's approach to psychodiagnostics as well as his original version of existential psychology that integrated the cognitive and the moral dimensions.

The article describes two ways of cognitive processing (holistic and analytical) in relation with the measurement and ontology of latent features. The author refers to the postulate of isomorphism of modern science and the main maxims about the nature of knowledge. It was shown that V.N. Druzhinin's fan model of abilities has high methodological potential and that the model can be instrumental in dealing with the problem of interpreting empirical data. In particular, she focuses on the actual and latent status of the measured features and discusses some potential ways to get the features operational. In conclusion, she refers to S. Harnad's idea of proposition and apposition as mechanisms of knowledge organisation.

The EEG-experiment consisted of four series in which 18 subjects were given identical sets of stimuli (patterns of coloured squares) under different instructions: either to look at the stimuli, to memorise them, to find the stimulus's element that was previously displayed to them, or to count the stimuli. The evoked potentials of the brain were recorded; for each series the co-ordinates of the dynamic equivalent dipoles were calculated; they were superposed with the subjects' MRI-tomogramms. In the series, in which the subject had to memorise and retain the image of the stimulus, the prefrontal areas 9 and 10 were activated, which did not occur in other series. There is a high correlation between the activity of the prefrontal area 10 and the visual area V3 (R=0.81), and between the activity of the area 9 and the area V4 (R=0.99). On the basis of these results, the author suggests a psychophysiological model of storing visual information in the working memory.