2011. vol. 8. No. 3

The paper proposes a cultural-historical periodisation of V.P. Zinchenko’s life and activity, presenting an integral outline of his interests and his diverse contributions to contemporary science and culture. The principal aspects of V.P. Zinchenko’s creative approach to science are described in comparison with encyclopaedic approach of the Renaissance era. The paper also presents a view of his original philosophic and psychological system set against the backdrop of the 20-21^st-century human sciences, and its more specific aspects, including his developments of the activity theory in general psychology, and his systemic psychological theories describing the interactions between image and action, intelligence and emotion, consciousness and reflexive activity, creativity and intuition. V.P. Zinchenko’s scientific works can be characterised as a union of fundamental research and its practical implementation in the fields of systems engineering and management, ergonomics and design, pedagogy and education, literature and culture.

The psychology beginning in V.P. Zinchenko’s personality can be defined as a fundamentally understanding and base-laying science of the foundations of individual lives, social life, and existence of civilisation and culture, a science revealing a range of possibilities, temptations, and perspectives to its followers. The necessary conditions for a synthesis between the exploratory and base-laying functions of psychology are analysed, turning it into a science of self-acting consciousness, inseparable from personality of its creator; a science of acts, instruments and results of individual and universal self-consciousness, demonstrating how consciousness can exist overcoming facticity and revealing new degrees of its freedom before itself and outside itself. The history of psychology for V.P. Zinchenko is a way of objectivation and subjectivation of consciousness using the means of consciousness itself.

The paper considers the possibility of discerning between two components of categorial priming based on the type of relationship of the prime to the object of categorisation. The first, situational, component is associated with the answer categories presented (when the prime and the categorisation object require the same answer); the second, semantic, component is associated with stable categorial structures in semantic memory (prime is a name of the category the object naturally belongs to). An empirical study utilised a task to categorise objects into “clothes” and “buildings” (object categories) based on “part-whole” (answer categories). The results indicated a negative categorial answer priming with no evidence of object priming. The effect magnitude was different for different object categories. The results are interpreted as evidence in favour of discerning between two components of non-conscious categorial priming.

A study of aggressive-theme text evaluation in people with different levels of psychoticism was performed. Based on their scores on H. Eysenck psychoticism scales, the respondents were classified into low-psychoticism (low levels of asocial tendencies) and high-psychoticism (high levels of asocial tendencies) groups. The respondents evaluated texts that described violence scenes using emotive and activational content scaling method. Differences between the two respondent groups were found on scales measuring fear and disgust, with respondents in the high-psychoticism group giving lower scores. Additional analyses indicated that inter-group differences in fear and disgust could not be explained by other personality traits (such as dispositional anxiety and neuroticism). The results are interpreted as evidence of lower empathy capabilities in peopler with high levels of psychoticism.

A study of association between individual differences and selective auditory attention task performance is presented. The paper emphasises the problem of attention dependency upon temperamental characteristics, treated in the context of theories by H. Eysenck, V. M. Rusalov, and J. Strelau. The study results are interpreted in the resource approach framework, indicating an influence of individual differences upon attention resource allocation strategy, mediated by activation. Automation of task performance was observed, associated by shift in the leading level of attention.

The paper shows the possibility of predicting performance decline and rise in medical staff during their work shift hours. Theoretical basis of the study is briefly presented. The research was done on 189 medical staff members in Perm. A self-report Diurnal Locus Scale was developed, exhibiting acceptable internal consistency, as well as discriminant and predictive validity. Diurnal locus mediated the effect of internality at work upon diurnal decline in medical staff performance. Limitations of the present study and research perspectives are discussed.