2012. vol. 9. No. 3

The paper analyses the temporal and spatial aspects of interpersonal relationships and the specific ways the factors of time and space play their role in this domain. These social-psychological phenomena are analyzed as multidimensional integral formations, the origin and functioning of which may be understood in category of chronotope and psychology of time. The methodological basis of such a view of communicative activity and interpersonal relationships themselves is the admission of fact of unity of interpersonal relationships and activity, when relationships are viewed as a side of joint activity, as its original derivative (G.M. Andreeva) in the whole system of social relationships that evolve in space and time. The author views temporal strategies and behavioral repertoire of personality, shows how they shift and occur in time or “are derealized” in plans and structures of behavior dependent on the events in present, past or planned future. In the same plane the specifics of regarding temporal factor in interpersonal relationships is analyzed. Each event in life or in social contact has its timeframe, which may be indefinite, or has either premature or overdue status, or become timely and urgent. Time becomes the fundamental factor of behavioral strategy choice: in every moment of relationship the interlocutor needs to be given time for solving own problems, not to be forestalled or interpreted prematurely. It is important to take into account not only immediate effects of impact. On the basis of scientific empirical data it is confirmed that the most deep and fundamental influences are the postponed psychological effects of interpersonal relationships (B.G. Anan’ev, N.I. Lisina, K.A. Abulhanova, L.A. Petrovskaya). Herewith it is important to take notice of the interlocutor’s emotional state in the ‘here-and-now’ and to be ready to invest one’s own time into understanding and empathizing with the other person. In difficult life situations it is important to achieve an active and timely coordination between the actors of their subjective time and space of their interaction, to achieve the so-called ‘spatio-temporal balance’ in order to coordinate their actions and construct their temporal ‘transspectives’ and life strategies. Thus, time have a multi-value influence with the specifics of spatio-temporal organization of activity and interpersonal relationships of a person in modern rapidly changing world. One may assert that time is one of the important but exceptionally little used reserves of psychic organization of personality and its interpersonal relationships in society.

The Psychology department of National Research University Higher School of Economics as one of the main centers of the Russian psychological science conducts many fundamental and applied studies of various agenda. One of the booming trends of contemporary science at the department is the research by some of its professors such frontier of human study as the psychology of reflection.

The goal of the research: to pinpoint main (shown at the department) approaches to study reflection, explicate their conceptual bases and characterize theoretical and experimental achievements.

Methodology of the research: historical, objective-thematic and methodological analysis of original works in the psychology of reflection, systemic-scientific and problematic-conceptual synthesis of theories and achievements in study of reflection.

Results of the research: 1) in scientific plane, among some concrete research at the department, fairly dealing with the agenda of reflection, most fundamental works were pinpointed that compose the theoretical and experimental base of study acute problems of the contemporary psychology of reflection and building its generic concepts; 2) objective-thematic analysis of these concepts allowed qualifying their theoretical-experimental and practical-applied realization (as branching research, based on definite grounds and conducted with the original methods as a compendium of empirical, methodical and conceptual developments) as distinctly formed scientific schools, intensively developing in the contemporary psychology of reflection; 3) the emerged systemic-methodological problem of the systematic sorting of the detected – as a result of thematic analysis – the objective variety of these schools of scientific research on various areas of psychological reality of reflection required as its solution to build a logic of development of the problem field of the contemporary psychology of reflection, seen as a theoretically grounded sequence of its all the more ontologically complicating aspects, studied at the department; 4) exposed by us gnostic logic explicated the relationship of studied at the department aspects of reflection, phenomenologically appearing in following situations: perceptive actions in motor-creative acts (conception of the underlying reflection by V.P. Zinchenko); reflexive choice of personality (transactional conception of reflection by V.A. Petrovsky); reflexive regulation of productive thinking and goal-setting of personality in problematic and conflict situations (conception of reflexive psychology of creativity by I.N. Semenov); reflexive-meaning focus of orientation of the consciousness of personality (conception of psychology of meaning by D.A. Leontiev); altered states of consciousness (conception of reflexivity of unconsciousness by A.V. Rossohin); diagnostics of abilities (conception of reflexivity of personality and its intellectual and professional abilities by V.D. Shadrikov); reflexivity of creativity of culture (conception of reflexive-personological model of development of personality by E.B. Starovoytenko). The paper presents the forms of intra-departmental, inter-university, and international collaboration of the reviewed scientific schools of NRU HSE in psychological and interdisciplinary research and development of reflection.

Conclusion: conducted in the article methodological analysis showed that pinpointed and characterized main conceptions of the contemporary Russian psychology of reflection are theoretically and methodically worked-through, experimentally and empirically verified, conceptually generalized, informatively presented, have applied significance for implementation of psychological knowledge (about the phenomena of reflection, its mechanisms, models and methods of diagnostics and development) into the social practice of education, management and consulting. Thus, the author established the scientific fact, according to which the analyzed concepts appear as the theoretical nucleus of the scientific schools in the area of study of the psychology of reflection, as they meet the methodological criteria that define the scientific status of innovational scientific schools in modern psychology.

An empirical study was conducted, aimed to find out the influence of alpha-training on auditory evoked potentials in a continuous attentional task setting with a binary answer choice and the dependency of the said influence on individual differences in temperament. All subjects were divided into experimental and control groups. Both groups had 2 identical experiments with the interval of 1 – 1.5 months. In the period between the experiments subjects of experimental group passed a training on biological feedback, aimed to train voluntary increase in alpha-rhythm in the upper part of individual range. In the second experiment in the experimental group there were found changes of the characteristics of the P2 and the N1-P2 complex, and the specific character of the change depended on three temperamental dimensions: neuroticism (according to EPI and NEO-FFI), mobility of nervous processes (according to PTS), and cooperation (according to NEO-FFI). The latency of P2 increased in subjects with high neuroticism and decreased in subjects with low neuroticism. The amplitude of P2 increased in subjects with high cooperation and high mobility of nervous processes. Also in subjects with high mobility of nervous processes the amplitude of the complex N1-P2 increased. Such changes didn’t happen in the control group. The suggestion is made that alpha-training influences patterns of brain activity, reflected in the given parameters of temperament. This leads to the transformation of early stages of brain processing of auditory stimuli during the task-solving and, accordingly, to changes in corresponding components of evoked potentials.

The age of adolescence is the most specific one as in this period significant physical as well as psychological alterations happen. The necessary condition of living through adolescence is the inclusion of a child into the system of relationships. This stage of growing up is the most contradictive and complicated. The reparative approach described in this paper is a theoretical foundation of social psychological work with adolescents exhibiting deviant behavior. According to this approach the social situation of development (SSD) is not only the physical existence in child’s environment of these or those persons, but the perception of the child those persons and relationships with them. In the framework of this approach all forms of deviant behavior of adolescents are viewed as a reaction to the material and social-psychological tension of social situation of adolescent. Social-psychological maladjustment appears as a result of a breakdown in the system of relationships of social situation of a child. The development of new online forms of communication among adolescents has led to a change in their social situation. Adolescent deviant behavior has also been affected by the changing social environment. The paper presents the data on social changes that happened to adolescents in the street: the deeper personal contacts in the company are changed to more available (with the help of the new media) contacts with the larger amount of people. The possible consequences of those changes for adolescent development and deviant behavior manifestations are discussed. The outcome of the paper is a set of suggested modifications to the technology of social psychological work with adolescents in a situation of social maladjustment and those exhibiting deviant behavior.

The research addresses the mechanisms and change patterns of the psychological structure of written speech in agraphia associated with differences in the content of written tasks. The organization of the psychological processes that underlie writing is considered to be an active process that has adaptive value and takes place in the context of specific tasks set before the person. An empirical research program is proposed combining the traditional approach to agraphia diagnostics with analysis of changes in writing productivity associated with writing tasks of cultural-historic content. There were three special experimental tasks: on communicative, mnestic and regulative functions of writing. People with diagnosed blood stroke in the pool of medium brain artery took part in the study. There were 25 subjects of age range 36 – 70. The number of mistakes made during the written task performance was used as a measure of writing productivity. The results of statistical analysis with the criteria Friedman χ2 and Wilcoxon T-criterion allowed identifying significant differences in performance during traditional and non-traditional tasks in each group of subjects. All the tasks with the exception of dictation that touched the affected in the sensory aphasia part of the acoustic gnosis showed significant differences from the tasks that actualize communicative and mnestic functions. The number of mistakes in the tasks of writing and remembering the narrative pictures significantly exceeded the number of mistakes in the tasks of written naming (z = 2.442, p = .015; z = 3.164, p = .002) and forming sentences (z = 2.386, p = .017; z = 3.700, p = .000). The acquired results allow a conclusion of changes in productivity of writing in dependence to the content of the written speech. It is found that the tasks that actualize culturally determined functions of writing influence differently on the productivity of writing, which is determined by the specifics of psychological content of the given tasks.

Traditionally creativity is conceived as a stable trait of personality or cognition that cannot be changed by induction in experimental settings. The authors present a short review of the main theoretical approaches. According to the data of some research the indexes of creativity are influenced by situational variables. In the study presented in this paper the attempt was made of goal-directing influence the mechanisms that generate original product or process. The semantic priming study conducted by the authors shows the aforementioned conception to be erroneous in relation to verbal creativity. For measuring indexes of creativity Guilford’s Alternate Uses with modified instruction was used. Before the main study a range of pilot studies (150 subjects) were conducted. In the main study 75 people took part: students and aspirants of humanitarian specialties of the Moscow universities. Priming with rare (as opposed to frequent) answers to the Guilford’s Alternate Uses led to statistically significant differences (F(2, 74) = 7.555, p = .001) in originality scores between the two groups of subjects with different priming type. Only originality of responses was affected, but not the frequency of primed categories. The influence of experimental conditions proved to be insignificant (F < 1). The structure of the acquired data don’t correspond either the theory of expansion of activation or the theories of creativity. Instead of semantic activation the activation of non-semantic categories takes place. Possible explanations refer to the general mechanisms of semantic memory organization and to the phenomenon of situational activation of stereotypes.

One of the leading trends of fundamental and applied research on attention is its allocation in space. Though there is a large amount of studies in this area, performed on a simple material of psychophysical tasks (where on the homogeneous field limited sets of simple objects are presented), it is relatively little known about the allocation of spatial attention during the perception of natural scenes. The dead zone of attention refers to a remarkable inability to notice perceptual events occurring around “the centre of interest” (an object that draws intense attention). The effectiveness of perceptual processing of objects and events in this area is declined to such extent that the observer demonstrates stable ignoring of the marked changes of these objects – “blindness to change” – and the intensity of this blindness significantly exceeds the intensity of analogous mistake of attention on the farther periphery. The two experiments compared the speed of search and accuracy of detection of visual changes near and far from “the centers of interest”. In both experiments, observers had preliminary knowledge about the dead zone of attention. In the first experiment the second change was either near or far, whereas in the second experiment in addition to already found central change not one, but two peripheral changes were provided: both near and far. Results were then compared to the ones from our earlier experiments (Utochkin, 2011) where no preliminary information was provided. It was found that preliminary knowledge has no effect on the speed of search for changes but increases the likelihood of change detection and correct recognition within the dead zone. The results are discussed in terms of metacognitive regulation and strategies of visual inspection of scenes.

The paper describes experimental studies of hint in problem solving, as well as theoretical approaches to understanding the mechanisms underlying the hint phenomenon. The empirical results revealing the conditions of effective hinting are described with particular attention to the conditions of spontaneous transfer of auxiliary information. The conditions of hint utilization include active search for hints, resemblance between the hint source and the target task, common coding and extraction processes of the task and the hint, the temporal relation between the moments of hint and task presentation, depth of processing of the task and the hint, and reaching an impasse in the course of task solution. On the basis of the analysis of the studies following conclusions can be made. A range of experiments showed that hint use is possible only with the knowledge of its presence and intentional search of the relevant information. Probably, the instruction becomes important, when the conditions necessary for spontaneous transfer are not fulfilled. The studies on the similarity between the task and the hint and how it heightens the effectiveness of the auxiliary material showed that the use of the material that has direct answer was more often in the case of spontaneous attention. Hint may be effective independently from time of presentation, but a hint that was presented after the initial solving of the main task is more effective if it is not postponed. The deepness of the procession of the main task influenced the way the received hint was used. Also the data of the research allow stating that for the effective action of the hint, on the one side, the processed representation of the task is needed, and on the other side, the absence of fixation on repeated wrong variants of solution. Theoretical explanations of the hint effect in complex tasks are discussed, and the differences in hint use associated with individual differences in creativity are analyzed.