2021. vol. 18. No. 1

The present article aims to assess psychometric characteristics of a Russian version of the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2). This questionnaire measures five basic personality domains, as well as three facets per domain. We collected data from an Internet sample comprised of 1,787 people (31.9% of men) aged from 14 to 54 years (M = 26.31; SD = 7.76). The study covered over ten regions of the Russian Federation. The factorial structure of the BFI-2 was examined using the principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and random intercept exploratory factor analysis. The five-factor structure of the BFI-2 was confirmed both at the domain and facet levels. Strict measurement invariance was obtained across sex, which makes it possible to compare raw scores of the questionnaire when assessing sex differences. Sex differences obtained in this study were consistent with those published in the extant literature. Across the BFI-2 subscales, internal consistency measured by the Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega ranged from satisfactory to excellent. The Ferguson’s delta (adapted by M. Hankins) was high which shows that the Russian BFI-2 can distinguish individuals with various manifestations of a domain or facet. To summarize, the Russian version of the BFI-2 represents a reliable and valid tool for measuring the basic traits of personality.

According to C. Carver and M. Scheier, dispositional optimism is a cognitive disposition (personal trait) which includes general expectations about the future or person’s tendency to believe that there will be more positive events in the future than negative ones. Many researches showed that optimism as positive expectations is related to better indicators of physical health, psychological well-being, better interpersonal relationships. The main posited mechanism of these relations is the influence of optimism on motivation that manifests itself in readiness of optimists to make efforts to solve problems that occur in their lives. The paper presents the results of approbation of the LOT-R, revised version of dispositional optimism questionnaire developed by M. Scheier, C. Carver and M. Bridges. Validation was realized in two studies — in the sample of undergraduate and postgraduate students of different universities (n = 406) and in the representative Russian sample (N = 1509). Both of these studies demonstrated a high reliability of the questionnaire (a = 0.78). Using confirmatory factor analysis, the two-factor structure (including optimism factor and style of answer factor) was confirmed. The validity of the Russian version of LOT-R is supported by substantive correlations with indicators of psychological well-being and moderate but statistically significant correlations with indicators of optimistic attributional style. The construct validity of the test is also supported by correlations with indicators of self-regulation, hope, and hardiness. Detailed information about the association between dispositional optimism and sociodemographic variables (gender, age and educational level) are presented. The statistical norms are provided. The LOT-R questionnaire provides wide opportunities for Russian psychologists to continue the research on dispositional optimism and its impact on health, well-being, performance, and interpersonal relationships.

The article presents the results of the Russian adaptation of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons, Harris, 2000). The adaptation was conducted between 2019 and 2020 on a sample of 596 children 5-6 years old. One year later, 351 children were retested to assess the ability of the tool to reflect age dynamics in development of emotion understanding. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to examine the theoretical structure underlying the tool. The empirical data obtained on the Russian sample confirmed the high correspondence of the Russian version of the tool to its original theoretical model. The result of applying Cochran's Q-test of equal proportions indicated acceptable reliability of the tool based on the internal consistency of its components. The validity of the test is confirmed by moderate positive correlations between the general level of emotion comprehension and individual test components with facial emotion recognition (Affect Recognition subtest NEPSY-II). Similar to the original version of the test, no gender differences were revealed for any of the test components in the Russian sample. The analysis of age-related differences in children's performance on the test during initial and repeated testing showed that the number of correct answers in all components of the test significantly increased one year after the first examination, which verifies the ability of the instrument to reflect age dynamics. As a result of adaptation of the test, Russian norms for children of 5-6 and 6-7 years old were obtained. The future application of the test opens up broad possibilities for international cooperation in empirical studies of the nature of emotion understanding in preschool age and in practical tasks, such as diagnostics or design of programs for children's emotional development.

The paper presents the development and the results of testing a new tool Integrative Intercultural Competency Questionnaire, aimed at studying the ability to function effectively in an intercultural communication context. The questionnaire was created on the basis of the integration of 52 constructs from 14 methods for measuring intercultural competence. The research (N = 1024) revealed that the tool contains four subscales: Intercultural Stability (individual personality characteristics that allow a person to be resistant to stressful situations of intercultural communication), Intercultural Interest (desire to communicate with people from other cultures, interest in culture and cultural differences), Lack of Ethnocentrism (respect and acceptance of cultural diversity) and Management of Intercultural Interaction (wide range of communication skills, important for intercultural communication). The subscales have good internal consistency and invariance with some limitations in comparing people of different ages. The research also demonstrated the external validity of the tool. The subscales of the Integrative Intercultural Competency Questionnaire are positively associated with the Extended Cultural Intelligence Scale. People who demonstrate higher rates on individual scales of the questionnaire are distinguished by a large number of specific intercultural achievements. Correlations of the subscales with indicators of adaptation of foreign students, emotional burnout, and self-efficacy among teachers working in a multicultural environment are observed.

The reasons for innovations inside and outside the education system have attracted much research interest over the past decades. However, there is still a lack of methodological tools to measure motives of actors coming from inside and outside the system to launch their innovative projects. The article describes approaches to measure the construct “motivation for innovative activity,” as well as the results of adaptation of the scale aimed at measuring motives for creation of innovative educational projects. The tool is based on the  scale, constructed in English, “Reasons to create business projects” (PSED). In this research the scale was translated into Russian, adapted for the group of innovators in education and validated within a classical framework of combining exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (EFA and CFA, respectively). Additionally, the subscales were evaluated in terms of internal coherence. The Russian and the English version of the scale were compared, and each subscale was interpreted. Adaptation was performed on the sample of innovators in education, that is, the participants of Competition of Innovations in Education (N = 286). The final scale includes 16 statements and allows to evaluate the intensity of four motivational attitudes towards innovative activity: “Social significance,” “Innovations and creativity,” “Self-realization and achievement,” “Finance and autonomy.” The identified motives reflect certain endeavors and goals of innovators and determine the content and orientation of their educational projects. The instrument can be used for both research and practice purposes to explore motivation of proactive actors in education, as well as similar groups involved in the development of public social spheres. The full version of the scale is presented in the appendix and contains the instructions for respondents and scoring criteria for four subscales.

Worldview beliefs related to freedom vs. determinacy in the surrounding and inner world are the focus of active discussion and research in psychological science. The paper presents the results of approbation and construct validation of the Russian-language version of the freedom/determinism beliefs inventory FAD-Plus by D. Paulhus and J. Carey. The results of the research on the sample of first-year psychology students from Moscow universities (N = 372) confirmed the original four-factor structure of the questionnaire, which embraces four scales: Fatalistic Determinism (Cronbach’s a = .793), Freedom (Cronbach’s a = .777), Unpredictability (Cronbach’s a = .689), Scientific Determinism (Cronbach’s a = .675). For the construct validation of the questionnaire, correlations of the inventory scales with a number of variables referring to well-being, motivation and self-regulation were considered, including dispositional and attributional optimism, subjective well-being and emotional state, meaningfulness of life and attitudes to one’s life, psychological needs satisfaction, personal responsibility. The results suggest that the Russian-language version of the freedom/determinism beliefs inventory has good psychometric properties and can be used as a helpful research instrument. Correlation analysis revealed positive relations between the belief in freedom and multiple characteristics of well-being: satisfaction with life, positive emotions, optimism, meaningfulness of life, attitudes to one’s life, satisfaction of basic psychological needs, personal responsibility and sensitivity to feedback. Other types of beliefs showed weaker correlations with psychological characteristics. The belief in unpredictability was negatively associated with positive emotions, attributive optimism, meaningfulness of life, awareness of life, responsibility and sensitivity to feedback. The belief in scientific determinism had negative correlations with attributional optimism in a situation of success, activity regarding one’s life, sensitivity to feedback and satisfaction of the need for competence. Belief in fatalistic determinism is in many ways similar to scientific determinism in terms of correlations, but unlike the latter, it also positively correlated with satisfaction with life and a sense of harmony with one’s life.

The article examines the relationship between characteristics of text messages, composed by users of social network (VKontakte), and intelligence. The analysis is conducted on the regional level: we compared the regional IQ with the text parameters averaged over the users living in one region. The text parameters include formal, grammatical and emotional indexes. The regional IQ is computed as an average z-score of the Unified State Examination score (high school entrants, 2018) and IQ score of the attendees to the volunteer military service. Four text parameters that can be considered as markers of the text cognitive complexity (mean word length, mean sentence length, percent of the parenthetic words and phrases, percent of the simple propositions) predicted regional IQ independently and explained 60% of its variance. Emotional index correlates with regional IQ, but does not predict regional IQ independently of cognitive complexity markers. Moreover, we revealed correlations between regional IQ and literacy of VKontakte users. The significancy of these results is creating the new IQ measure, which allows evaluating regional IQ and its dynamics by means of text analysis. The method has an advantage over the traditional psychometric IQ measures in this field of research.

The article describes the role of the mathematische Psychologie in the German philosophical discourse of the 19th – early 20th centuries. The history of mathematical psychology is viewed from the standpoint of the disciplinary approach in historiography. The author focuses on the reconstruction of social mechanisms that determine the content of the discipline, its relationship with the structure and specifics of the functioning of universities and academic institutions, as well as academic corporations. The author shows that several times mathematical psychology had been in the center of disciplinary conflicts. At first, it was a subject of controversy between the Herbartarians and the Neo-Kantians. After the publication of Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics, academic philosophers perceived physiological psychology as "mathematical psychology". By the end of the 19th century, after the heyday of psychophysics, during the rise of a new wave of Neo-Kantianism, the psychology of Herbart and psychophysics became the subject of a polemic between Dilthey and Ebbinghaus about the revision of the methodological bases of psychology. The discussion of the early 20th century on the exclusion of experimental psychology from the list of philosophical disciplines completes the process of turning to mathematical psychology as an argument for defining the disciplinary boundaries. The history of mathematische Psychologie showed that even when it was only a question of mathematics as a method, real battles took place in philosophical disciplines, in which representatives of different methodological camps tried to defend their independence. Started as a philosophical argument, the debate on the mathematische Psychologie gradually turned into a branding of the methodologically backward and outdated.

The article analyzes the work by V.M. Petrov, published in the journal World of Psychology, in which he proposes a restructuring of the humanities based on a system-information approach. The author of the present article compares this proposal with the ideas by L.S. Vygotsky, 1927, set out in his work The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis. Methodological Research). The present article tries to show that the systemic approach must be understood differently than Petrov does, namely not as the ultimate ontology, but as a transformed form of methodology. In addition, relying on systemic development of G.P. Shchedrovitsky, as well as the reconstruction of the history of the natural sciences, a hypothesis is proposed, according to which the implementation of the systemic approach involves the construction of two coordinated languages — "systemic-structural" and "objective-systemic". For Shchedrovitsky, the second language is the language of the theory of activity, where activity is interpreted as a system, while for Petrov, probably, it is the theory of information. The author has a different view from Petrov’s on the main tasks of reforming psychology: there is a need for convergence of natural-scientific and humanitarian approaches, rethinking the connection between psychological science and practice, as well as reconsideration the psychological science itself, understanding the new status and nature of a person who has fallen into the transition processes and the complex reality of postmodernism (post-culture). He discusses the conditions required for solving these problems. These include the author’s concept of science, accounting for the two stages of psychology development and specifics of psychological science, as well as some specifics of the current state of culture. The author comes to the conclusion that the systemic approach helps in the study of the mind within the framework of a separate science (concept), but does not respond to the difference in paradigms, in addition, the diversity of human and personality types is conceptualized in psychological knowledge and science in the form of many psychological concepts, theories and practices, which is completely normal and does not require reform. But the methodological culture of psychologists needs to be improved.

The article deals with the psychological aspects of spirituality. The concepts of spiritual intelligence, spiritual capacities, and spiritual personality are analyzed. The study was based on the idea of a psychological model of spiritual capacities proposed by the author. This model includes three components: moral, mental, and transcendent. The moral component was selected to be explored in detail and was empirically studied. The principal constituent of the moral component of spiritual capacities is a spiritual altruistic tendency; its connection with productive life is analyzed in the article. The objective of the study was the investigation of the relationships between spiritual personality, spiritual capacities and productive life activity. The participants were 662 adults (206 males, 456 females): students and full-time employees aged 18–45 years (M = 26.08) from two cities of the Russian Federation (Kostroma and Taganrog). Correlational and comparative analysis was used for data processing. It was found that respondents with higher levels of “spiritual personality” significantly differed, according to the Mann–Whitney U test by a higher productivity of life activity (U = 43028; p < .001) and had higher levels of spiritual capacities — the spiritual altruistic tendency (U = 46328,5; p < .022). The correlational analysis showed that the higher was the level of manifestation of spiritual capacities — the spiritual altruistic tendency, the higher was the productivity of life activity. The results obtained make it possible to note the importance of the construct “spiritual capacities” and the need for its further scientific psychological research, as well as to emphasize the practical significance of spiritual capacities for the prosperous and productive functioning of society.

The article addresses the issue of the relation between religiosity and psychological well-being of a person in an existential-psychological understanding. A correlational study has been conducted by means of an online survey on public platforms. From the original sample, the respondents have been chosen according to two criteria: the respondents' self-identification as individuals who believe in God and the respondents' affiliation to the Russian Orthodox Church. The final sample consisted of 153 people. Assessment of their existential well-being was based on the notion of “fulfillment”, which was measured with the Test of Existential Motivations (TEM). The frequency of several spiritual practices such as prayer, church attendance, reading the Bible, participation in religious celebrations and fasting, has been analyzed in terms of its partial and cumulative effect on the levels of existential fulfillment. For the purposes of assessment of the cumulative contribution that spiritual practices have on an individual, a scale of Objective Religiousness was created (Cronbach’s a = .89). The following methods were used for processing the results: one sample T-Test, correlation analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis. The hypothesis about the positive correlation between the existential fulfillment of religious people and the frequency with which they carry out their spiritual practices has been confirmed. The results of this study demonstrate a higher level of existential fulfillment shown by Orthodox Christians as compared to the expected average levels of fulfillment according to TEM in the previous Russian studies. The frequency of religious practices is a significant predictor of fulfillment: Christians having an active spiritual life report higher levels of existential fulfillment. The most significant correlation (b = 0.31) has been revealed on the subscale, according to which life is perceived as meaningful. An interpretation of the revealed correlation has been suggested in accordance with the existential analytical theory: religiosity serves as a personal resource due to “exercising” spiritual activity by a person. The limitations and the prospects of the study have also been outlined.

Spatial attention of people involved in a co-operative activity is often directed to the same objects in the environment. At the same time, one of the partners’ gaze redirection can be involved in controlling attention of others. It could be assumed that the degree of the gaze cueing effect, which has become a focus of growing research interest in recent decades, might be influenced by such social psychological factors as one’s attitude towards the partner and social distance between the partners. To test these assumptions, a virtual 3D environment was created, in which a modified version of the cueing paradigm by Posner et al. (1978) was implemented. An intergroup experimental design was used. For one group of participants, the anthropomorphic avatar was introduced in the instruction as a “virtual assistant”, for the other group, it was presented as a “virtual assessment specialist”. The avatar could provide valid and invalid gaze cues regarding the future target location. Both groups participated in two experimental sessions, in one session the distance between the participant and the avatar was 1.5 m (comfortable distance corresponding to the zone of formal social contacts) and in the other session the distance was 1 m (uncomfortable distance corresponding to the zone of personal contacts). The gaze cueing effect was observed through all experimental conditions in a virtual environment. However, it was more pronounced for the “assisting” set than for the “assessing” one. Interestingly, for the assisting set, the effect was asymmetric: the gain due to a valid cue turned out to be less pronounced than the delay in the response to a target after an invalid cue. For both conditions, the gaze cueing effect was more pronounced at a distance of 1 m between the participant and the avatar than at a distance of 1.5 m. The latter result could be associated either with the large angular dimensions of a gaze cue or with blurring of boundaries of the personal zone in the virtual environment. The results can be applied in the development of educational virtual environments.

The author discusses vocalizations as using non-verbal voice sounds in self-expression and self-inquiry. The purpose of the study was to investigate the experience of self-expression and self-inquiry through vocalizations in the situations of valuing and evaluating. The researcher hypothesized that placing an individual in a safe place for self-expression on the conditions of valuing creates more authentic and genuine feelings, helping to reveal their authentic voice. On the contrary, placing a person under conditions of evaluating and impressiveness leads to a less authentic feeling and sounding. Two groups of participants were separated. The expressive group was created using the condition of valuing. The impressive group was created using the condition of evaluating. Participants in both groups used their voices to express themselves performing research tasks and then filled out the survey applications reflecting the sounder’s body, voice, feelings and listener’s feelings during the research. The application’s indicators were grouped into six factors: “Psychophysiological authenticity”, “Psychological authenticity”, “Satisfaction”, “Vocalization change”, “Perceived emotional involvement”, and “Perceived satisfaction”. The multilinear mixed effect regression models were built to investigate the influence of the research conditions on these factors and their dynamics. The t-test was used to compare the results between the groups. Significant differences were revealed with the factors “Psychophysiological authenticity”, “Psychological authenticity”, “Satisfaction”, and “Perceived satisfaction”. They were greater in the expressive group than they were in the impressive group. The indicators of “Perceived satisfaction” were growing.