2006. vol. 3. No. 3

The author postulates a class of psychological phenomena in which their inner (inter-corporeal) and outer (extra-corporeal) sides, their separation and unification, form a whole. The class is a subject matter of the so-called conception of the meta-individual world. How does the contradictory wholeness emerge in this class of phenomena and what are its inner mechanisms? This is the main issue the conception has to deal with. The meta-individual world is a heterogeneous poli-system with many qualities and determining factors. Its existence and functioning is regulated by the principles of relativity and complementarity, of parallelism and transitions between the systems. In the meta-individual world, four relatively independent areas are distinguished: «authorship», «possession», «acceptance» and «dependence».

The article deals with the issues of intelligence and creativity in interpersonal relationships. The author re-interprets the notion of intellectual activity by transforming it into a larger conception and demonstrating its connections with the traditional meaning of intellect and creativity, on the one hand, and with thinking and creative activity, on the other hand. In the author’s view, intellectual activity is interactive, is realised together with other persons and has a significant impact on their intellectual and creative abilities. The empirical study shows how personal traits and interpersonal relationships between the teachers and his/her students influence the development of students’ intellect and creativity.

The authors describe the attempts, both conceptual and methodical, to account for and to analyse emotional factors of decision-making - the attempts which took place at various stages of development of the economic theory. They also examine potential factors of drawing economists’ interest to the problem. The authors describe main arguments of those economist researchers, who take into account the emotional component of economic behaviour, as well as their actual attempts to include emotions into economic analysis. The focus is on the game experiment that the economists conducted in order to examine the role of emotions. The authors discuss various tendencies in game theory and evolutionary economics and the convergence of economic and social methods as the factor that determines economists’ interest in the study of emotions.

The article offers an interdisciplinary study of transitive/intransitive character of superiority relations: A is superior (inferior) to B, B is superior (inferior) to C, A is superior (inferior) to C. The author argues that the transitivity principle is not universal. In many subject areas, and with the help of various methods, it is shown that the transitivity axiom withstands only if there is no interaction between the objects under comparison, and that it fails in more complex cases. The author suggests that in such cases a different argumentative basis is needed. He introduces four situation types relating to a) the objective character of transitivity/intransitivity relations; b) their subjective evaluation by a person. He concludes by examining the consequences of decision-making, including erroneous decisions made on the assumption of the principle of transitive relations.

Different versions of the utility maximization paradigm are examined and the problem of representing preferences and choice functions by utility functions is studied. Results obtained in the classical case (without the comparison threshold) and in the case of the threshold depending on one alternative are compared. The models are constructed in which the threshold depends on two compared alternatives and/or a feasible set of alternatives. A model explaining H. Simon’s paradigm of choice is described.

The seeks the processes in common which might account for the perceived correlation between intellect and creative abilities. Though the idea of a link between creativity and spreading activation is rather old, it has not been involved in the discussion of the processes behind intelligence. The author suggests that her experiments (one is with intelligence tests, the other is with words recognition and categorisation) allows one to hypothesise that spreading activation might play an essential role in intellectual processes as well. She offers a model that describes a special effect which activation has on intellectual task solving.

The suggested study deals with the influence of professional experience on interpreting frustrating circumstances and on the most plausible (from the subject’s point of view) way of dealing with them. Two occupations, more or less vulnerable to emotional exhaustion, were compared. The results show that the occupation with the higher risk of emotional exhaustion leads to a more frequent choice of particular schemes of interpreting frustrating circumstances. The author traces the differences between representatives of the two occupations in the ways they respond to frustrating situations.