2019. vol. 16. No. 4

The analysis of theoretical work on the psychology of activity by leading Russian psychologists has shown that the principle of the activity approach is deeply and comprehensively developed in Russian psychology and has reasonably acquired the status of a paradigm. Conceptual models of the activity approach can be successfully applied while setting exploratory programs and developing specific research designs. It can be reasonably argued that the activity approach has not only had a rich past, but it also has a successful present and future. This study reports on the general structure of the activity psychological functional system (APFS) that is close to the general structure of the physiological functional system suggested by P. K. Anokhin. However, the APFS in its components and the relationships between them is filled with a new content that is primarily determined by the human mind. The issue of the ability’s place in an activity structure is addressed in this paper. Understanding activity from the standpoint of system genesis reveals the essence of human development processes and provides for understanding of the relationship between activity and development; it shows the place of abilities in the implementation of activities and enables the understanding of the development mechanism in abilities and activities. It is shown that abilities are mechanisms of activity realization, and that activity may be considered from the position of a system of abilities employed to accomplish it that undergoes permanent changes in regard to the composition and the extent of the constituents’ interaction.

The article is devoted to the acute problem of studying operativeness of personal professional development. The article shows that the founder of the theory of operativeness is D.A. Oshanin, who investigated the figurative forms of manifestation of operativeness. The next stage in the development of the theory of operativeness is associated with the name of V.D. Shadrikov. By means of theoretical and empirical analysis, he showed that not only the operational image, but also the subsystem of professionally important personality traits is developed in accordance with the principles of operativeness. This article attempts to empirically prove that the formation and realization of the system of self-regulation of professional activity is also subordinate to the principles of operativeness. For this purpose, the authors carried out a theoretical analysis of the concept of operativeness and defined it. The approach to understanding self-regulation of activity, which is implemented in the study, is outlined. A comparative empirical analysis of the self-regulation systems of the activities of general practitioners and surgeons, as well as elementary and high school teachers, is carried out. On the quantitative, qualitative, and structural levels, the specifics of the development of self-regulation systems for various types of professional activity are determined. Statistically significant correlations between the level of development of the components of the self-regulation system and the efficiency of activity are revealed. It was shown that the more activities differ from each other, the more the self-regulation systems differ from each other as well, primarily at the qualitative and structural levels. The results were used to prove the operativeness of development of the self-regulation system of activities.

Self-regulation theory of C. Carver and M. Scheier considers goal disengagement and reengagement as an important component of effective self-regulation, closely related to sensitivity to feedback, especially negative one. Empirical studies confirm that the difficulties of changing the strategy of achieving the goal and the goal itself even with obvious negative feedback (the escalation effect) are common in the norm. The change of the goal, if it is impossible to achieve it, is linked to the better subjective well-being in the elderly. The aim of the study was to reveal the role of cognitive insight as a measure of sensitivity to feedback from others and goal reengagement in subjective well-being under different demands at work. 600 employees of the heat and power company filled the Goal Disengagement and Reengagement Scale, Beck Cognitive Insight Scale, demand-related scales of Job Demands and Resources Questionnaire, the Satisfaction With Life Scale, the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule, Schaufeli’s Utrecht Work Engagement Scale and Maslach’s Emotional Burnout scale. Moderation analysis demonstrated that the interaction effects are manifested in relation to positive, but not to negative indicators of general well-being and well-being at work. The results suggest that positive emotions and work engagement are associated with greater flexibility and attention to the opinions of others. It can be assumed that a goal reengagement contributes more to positive emotions and life satisfaction in those with higher level of cognitive insight. However, the sensitivity to feedback, especially under high demands at work, should not be an expression of uncertainty and anxiety, but a manifestation of willingness to change the goal if necessary.

Prospects for the development of entrepreneurship in Russia as an economic phenomenon are conditioned both by objective reasons, and by socio-psychological and individual-personal readiness for entrepreneurship. Psychological analysis of the sources of productive activity is based on the highlighting of the main external function of entrepreneurship and its forms - intensive and extensive development, as well as the internal function — the management of the organization. The need for such differentiation of functions to identify the characteristics of the activities and personality of small and major entrepreneurs is discussed. Theoretical representations and empirical data on the conditions and features of the activity, psychological characteristics of small and major entrepreneurs, as well as managers of middle and higher levels of management are systematized. Innovation is acknowledged as the leading characteristic of entrepreneurs' activity, which is manifested in the emergence and implementation of new socially significant goals, new means of achieving known goals. It is noted that innovation in small and large business is characterized by different mechanisms. Large firms are characterized by entrepreneurial management, focused on organizational transformation and decision-making at all levels of complex hierarchical systems, increasing the resilience and competitive ability of the organization. Decision-making is balanced, risks are assessed and small. For small businesses, innovation is taking the form of more profound change to ensure survival and development - the risks are great and difficult to manage because of limited resources. Because of the differences, we should expect differences in individual-personality characteristics of entrepreneurs of large and small businesses, impacting the success of activities. Empirical research in an explicit form did not reveal the differences between entrepreneurs of small and large businesses, which is reflected in reality - small business today provides mainly expansion of the resources of society, the share of innovative enterprises is small, only entrepreneurs with no signs of innovation were affordable - in the fields of trade, communication and small-scale production. The results of the diagnostics of personal characteristics of entrepreneurs and managers confirmed the priority of motivation of achievement in entrepreneurs, manifested in risk-proneness; as well as revealed specifics of intelligence and communication processes, needed for the success of entrepreneurship. However, there are no reasonable grounds to abandon the idea of differentiating entrepreneurship in the form of the implementation of the function of development, as well as the search for the main determinant or systemic determinants of the internal intentions for transformative activity as the main characteristic of entrepreneurs.

The article presents an attempt of explication of the Spinozist basis of the theory of activity in general psychology. Possible reasons for rare references to B. Spinoza by A.N. Leontiev are examined, in comparison to L.S. Vygotsky, who considered it necessary to “revive Spinozism in Marxist psychology”, built, to his mind, on a dualism of Cartesianism. L.S. Vygotsky’s works are analyzed, in which the historical conditioning and methodological limitations of spiritualism and mechanicism were presented as the possible ways of removing the dichotomy in the context of Spinozism. Further, the article states that the definition of activity in the school of A.N. Leontiev as a substance, which has poles – subject and object, and the definition of the mind, correspondingly, as a function of this substance, directly follows from ontological monism by B. Spinoza and its further development in authentic Marxism, where substance started being interpreted as a universal interaction. It is shown that for A.N. Leontiev the starting philosophical category also was interaction, one of the forms of which is activity, studied in psychology in its specific function (orientative in a wide sense); from this the representatives of the A.N. Leontiev’s school concluded that all psychic processes – even the elementary sensations – have the activity nature. It is emphasized that according to the principal statements of this school, mind is to be understood as a function (attribute, in Spinoza’s terms) of activity, and not as its special form. This means that the psychic is not equated to the “internal activity”: it acts as a functional organ of the “external” (practical) and “internal” (theoretical) activity, which performs its orientative-regulative work in both of them. Such a solution of the mind-activity problem allows removing the dichotomy of spiritualism and mechanicism and criticizes the popular definition of mind as a function of the brain, which reflects external world per se.

AbstractThe objective of the study is to reveal the connection of the third brain block (according to A.R. Luria – functions of programming, control and serial organization) with social activity. The hypothesis is following: the higher is the level of social activity, the better preserved are the functions of the third brain block. The general sample consisted of 60 participants (from 55 to 65 years old). In the first stage of the study the participants were interviewed for assessment of their level of social activity (low, middle and high). The second stage was neuropsychological diagnostics (elaborated by A.R. Luria and modified by T.V. Akhutina). The different groups successfully carried out different tasks on functions of programming, control and regulation of activity. The high-level group was better in the test on reaction of choice; the average-level group – in the test on the exclusion of irrelevant concept; the low-level group – in the task of the retelling. However, the high level group successfully carried out tasks on serial organization. The hypothesis was partially confirmed. Not the whole third block is more preserved in the high-level group. The connection between the third brain block and social activity is proved. Two main conclusions: probably, the social activity determines the preservation of the functions of programming, control and regulation; perhaps, the preservation of the serial organization determines the capabilities of social activity. We conclude that the connection between social activity and the third brain block is bilateral. The obtained results can be used in the elaboration of neurocognitive training for the elderly.

Standardized sets of stimuli are widely applied in studies on visual perception and speech production. They provide valuable information about a range of parameters that can be controlled as confounding variables in experiments. The present study provides Russian-language normative data for 542 pictures from the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), which contains high-quality photos of everyday objects (such as kitchen utensils, clothes, food, etc.). The study design consisted of two stages. In the first stage, 45 respondents aged from 19 to 46 (M = 24.9, SD = 6.1) were asked to name given objects, rate them on “familiarity” and “visual complexity”, and select in which of 18 categories they belong to. Afterward, the following parameters were determined for each image: modal name, modal name agreement (percentage of respondents who chose the most frequently used name for an object), mean visual complexity, mean familiarity, modal category, and category agreement. Photos with the modal name agreement greater than 50% (326 items) were taken for the second stage. In the second stage, 33 respondents aged from 19 to 44 (M = 25.3, SD = 4.9) rated selected pictures on “object agreement” (the degree to which photo of an object corresponds to its mental image), “viewpoint agreement”, and “manipulability” (the degree to which it is easy to imagine an action that is highly associated with this specific object). Eventually, mean values for all rated parameters were computed. The results are freely available online and can be used for conducting various experiments in the field of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.

The paper provides an overview of known heuristic techniques and different views on decision-making based on heuristics. We discuss heuristics of the “heuristics and biases” program introduced by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and heuristics of the “fast and frugal heuristics” program developed by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues. We propose the idea that heuristics, being a natural instrument of human assessment, may be applied not only for the simplification of the decision process, but also in deliberate strategies without sufficiently reducing the complexity of a problem. In light of this, we give an overview of the Analytic Network Process methodology as a cognitive process. The Analytic Network Process is a descriptive psychophysical process developed by the mathematician, a distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Thomas L. Saaty in the 1980s, and it is used for large-scale, multi-criteria decision analysis. It represents the decision problem as a network structure with dependences and feedbacks between included criteria and alternatives. Whether applying heuristics may help to answer questions like “which of the two elements influence more”, pairwise comparisons of considered elements give more accurate answers on “how strong is this influence”. The aim of this article is to draw the attention of psychologists to the interdisciplinary research of the Analytic Network Process that has only been previously studied as a mathematical algorithm, and not as a cognitive process.

The aim of present research is to determine the contribution of motor and perceptive components of embodied cognition to language processing on the material of idiomatic expressions which are related to spatial locations of “up” (“the top of glory”), “down” (“the bottom of the pile”) and “up-down” (“to fall from the moon”). The importance of this research is to resolve the present contradiction: the contribution of sensorimotor components of embodied cognition to language processing and the congruence effect associated with them are not always found. This calls into question the key position of embodied cognition theories which argue that linguistic information processing involves simulation: e.g. processing spatial idioms implies activation of brain areas associated with spatial information processing. This experimental research has a methodical novelty: for the first time the influence of perceptual, motor and semantic factors on information processing is analyzed simultaneously and material combining opposite spatial characteristics of verbal expressions is used. According to the results of the study (N = 90), there is a congruency effect of motor and semantic factors. Also, the reaction time was the longest in case of a task with idioms combining opposite spatial locations (“to hung up on someone”, “to reach a bottom of a bowl”, “to fall from the moon”).  However, no interaction effects between motor, semantic and perception factors were found. It turned out that regardless of the type of idiom and its location on the screen, the reaction time was always longer in a non-congruent condition than in a congruent one, and “up-down” idioms were processed significantly longer than any other type of idioms. The obtained data demonstrates the contribution of the components of embodied cognition to language processing of spatial idiomatic expressions, but with certain limitations.

Аccording to the Five Factor Theory (McCrae & Costa, 2013), innate personality traits affect an objective biography after a characteristic adaptation. Attitudes toward traits are a reflexive kind of characteristic adaptations. Attitudes toward traits represent bipolar (positive vs. negative) evaluations of a psychological construct, stored in semantic memory, without reference to a particular person (Shchebetenko, 2014). The aim of this research is to study the validity of attitudes toward traits. As a result of an empirical study with a total sample of 1226 people, the structure of attitudes toward traits was obtained, generally repeating the five-factor structure of personality traits. All attitudes correlated with each other, correlation coefficient did not exceed r = .48, i.e., attitudes towards different traits are different, although related, phenomena. Strong correlations between openness, agreeableness, extraversion and the corresponding attitudes were discovered; moderate correlations between conscientiousness and the attitude to it were obtained; a weak correlation between neuroticism and the attitude toward it was found. Factor analysis showed that attitudes toward traits form one common factor. Structural modeling has demonstrated that theoretical hypotheses about the influence of personality traits, forming factors of Stability/Plasticity, on a single factor, formed by the attitudes toward traits, correspond to empirical data in general. The prospects of research are studies in another age group, and cross-cultural studies.

Solutions accompanied by Aha!-experiences are called insights, or, if they are wrong, false insights. Classical theories cannot give an explanation for false insight because they consider Aha!-experience and other metacognitive feelings just as side effects of the cognitive processes. From this perspective, dissociations between cognition and metacognition are impossible. According to the signal theories of insight, metacognitive feelings, including Aha!-experience, form in two stages. Finding a solution on the unconscious level causes a non-specific emotional signal that is attributed by consciousness to any process or task. In this case, false insight and other dissociations between cognitive and metacognitive processes appear because of the misattribution of the signal. The current work tests this hypothesis. We suggested that solving an interfering problem unconsciously would lead to false insights or higher feeling of knowing ratings. We created a method of the false semantic hint to simulate this situation in the experiment. The problems were anagrams with one solution and one word shorter by one letter inside them. The false hints were pictures that referred to shorter words inside the anagrams. We found that participants tend to make more intrusion errors after this type of priming. This proves our method to be working and means that the signal from an interfering problem might be attributed to the main one. Also, the feeling of knowing ratings after intrusion errors were higher than after omission errors. This result can be interpreted as an aftereffect of the initial metacognitive signal and a possibility of its repeated attribution.