Theoretical and Experimental Psychology. 2023. 2.

Background. The article is devoted to the psychological analysis of a new problem for the psychology of a possible — possibilistic thinking. It is substantiated that if classical psychology was directed to the past, focused on identifying the connections of past experience with current behavior, then the creative potential of the psychology of the possible lies in the fact that a very significant part of it is directed towards an unknown indefinite future. In the perspective of modern methodology of scientific knowledge, research in the psychology of the possible is based on the possibilistic thinking, including counterfactual reasoning and intuitive insight.

The objective of the study: to analyze the theoretical and methodological foundations of possibilistic thinking based on counterfactual reasoning and intuitive insight.

Results. The article presents an analytical review of research in the field of counterfactual thinking and serendipity. Two main areas of research into the possible are identified — cognitive and sociocultural. The cognitive direction of research reflects the desire of scientists to correlate and compare the real situation with the potentially acceptable and therefore possible. The sociocultural approach deals with the possible in a reality in which facts are not uniquely “objective”, because they depend on the opinions, attitudes, values, and norms of people. The sociocultural understanding of the human world is based on the analysis not only of the actual world, but also of the relation of possible worlds to it.

Conclusions. Possibilistic thinking is not structural and meaningful, but functional. It is actualized when, without focusing on options for changing the cognitive or communicative situation, it is impossible to understand its current state, as well as the potential for possible development. Significant components of possibilistic thinking are counterfactual reasoning and intuitive insight. The use of such thinking gives the cognizing subject an opportunity to deeply and fully analyze not only the current cognizable situation, but also possible past and future options for changing it.

Background. The article is devoted to the analysis of changes in modern scientific ideas about the giftedness of children in recent years on the example of the most famous concepts and models in the world. The relevance of the study is due to the need for scientific substantiation of approaches to the identification, development and support of gifted children as one of the priority areas of the education system.

Objective — to characterize the main trends in the evolution of the world-recognized concepts and models of intellectual giftedness and its development in the context of the modern education tasks, based on the analysis of scientific publications, mainly of the last five years.

Results. It is shown that one of the main trends of changes in the concepts of giftedness is the expansion and complication of ideas about its cognitive as well as non-cognitive intrapersonal components and their development in interaction with the influence of the environment. The research demonstrated specifics of manifestations and development of giftedness in different types of mental activity and the individual variability of its dynamics at different age and educational stages. The author substantiated the necessity of building an educational environment conducive to developing the giftedness of different types and creating more complex, varied, and dynamic educational strategies and methods.

Conclusion. The results of the study expand and deepen the understanding of giftedness in children and youth, demonstrate the variability of its cognitive, intrapersonal, sociopsychological characteristics,create a fundamental basis for the development and support of advanced educational practice.

Background. Russian monographs and textbooks describe only foreign psychological paradigms. The paradigms developed by Russian psychologists make it possible to achieve the level of scientific philosophical generalization, but do not specify the psychological paradigms themselves. Therefore, appealing to the system-complex paradigm seems to be especially relevant at the present stage of development of domestic psychology.

Objective. The study has its purpose to present a system-complex paradigm based on the works of Russian psychologists.

Sample. The study features the works of 35 scientists.

Methods. Historical analysis (historiogenesis) of psychological literature by foreign and domestic scientists.

Results. The study showed that in the works of domestic scientists an integral Person is considered as a subject of psychology, who can be described within the framework of a system-complex paradigm and understood only through the relationship of internal and external, biological and social, individual and societal, as a system, in its interdependence and development. When considering the phenomenon of human being, the combination of structural, systemic and complex approaches with evolutionary approach seems to be the most promising at the present stage of development of a holistic human knowledge.

Conclusion. The article presents scientific and methodological statements, views and positions of authoritative Russian scientists (philosophers, historians, psychologists) to substantiate and support the system-complex paradigm of domestic psychology. Within the framework of this paradigm, important problems of human studies and human knowledge are considered. In the conditions of scientific convergence of Western and Russian psychology, for the purpose of a deep and multidimensional study of a person, it seems appropriate to abandon the unilateral application of the principles of the one and only psychological paradigm and move to a systematic and complex use of the basic principles of modern psychology in their unity and interconnection.

Background. The relevance of the study is due to the need of investigating the effects of parents’ life orientations on the process of socialization of modern schoolchildren.

Objective. The study had its task to characterize the features of the relationship between the components of the life position of mothers and fathers raising children in full/single-parent families at different stages of their education.

Sample of the study consisted of 302177 parents of 1–11 grade students of general education schools from 85 regions of the Russian Federation. The analysis considered the data of 16463 fathers and 285714 mothers (of which 227855 are married women, 57859 are women raising children in a single-parent family).

Methods. Parents of primary, secondary, and high school students answered the ad hoc questionnaire relating to three components of their life position: value orientations, assessment of their life prospects success, assessment of subjective significance of certain social threats. The data obtained were analyzed taking into account the influence of both social stratification factors (completeness/incompleteness of a family) and a child age (grade at school). To identify the features of the relationship between the components of parental life position, the factor analysis procedure was used.

Results. The study revealed that the most significant life values for parents are health, successful professional activities, achieving fi nancial success, and a happy family life. At the same time, the value of professional realization turns out to be more significant for fathers, whereas realization in family life is more valuable for mothers. As a child grows, the parents actualize the value of professional self-realization while the importance of family life and achieving fi nancial success decreases, and the negative assessments of their future success grow. The factor analysis revealed the peculiarities of the life position of fathers and mothers raising a child in complete vs incomplete family: the “principle of complementarity” in full families and the deformation of traditional maternal position of women raising children in single-parent families.

Conclusions. The study demonstrated the significance of various life values and social threats among parents of children of different school age, which captures the uniqueness of the socio-psychological context of the child-parent relationships in the family.

Relevance. The study relevance is determined by the need to investigate the processes of gender socialization in the mid and late teens in the modern socio-cultural situation characterized by erosion of traditional gender stereotypes and transformation of basic representations about the content of men and women’s social roles.

Objective. The study had its purpose to explore and compare the boys’ and girls’ representations about modern men and women.

Methods. Data collection was carried out using the method of free descriptions, content analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics, Student’s t-test, r-Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, and share difference reliability criterion. Comparative historical analysis was carried out using the data obtained in the 1980s.

Sample. The sample included 353 high school and college students aged 16–19 years (161 boys and 192 girls).

Results. The initial hypothesis about the coexistence of both traditional and modern gender models among today’s teenagers has been confirmed only in relation to their ideas of the modern woman. When describing her, both boys and girls rely on traditional stereotypes of femininity as well as modern ideas (androgyny, egalitarianism). Modern man is still viewed and evaluated by both boys and girls through the prism of traditional masculinity stereotypes. Girls’ representations about modern men and women are less rigid and not as stereotypical as those of boys. They reflect to a greater extent the transformation of rigidgender stereotypes taking place in the modern society. Modern boys’ and girls’ representations about men and women are in many ways similar to the representations of their peers of the Soviet era. The differences are associated with less attention to family roles and a greater interest in appearance, self-expression, success, and mental health.

Conclusions. Despite the transformation of gender stereotypes taking place in the modern society, boys’ and girls’ representations about men and women are still based mainly on traditional ideas of masculinity/femininity.

Background. The study relevance is due to the need of expanding approaches to the prevention of maladaptive forms of adolescent behavior.

Objective: to find out and consider the features of concepts of death in younger and older adolescence on the basis of analysis of domestic and foreign research.

Results. The study considered the cognitive, emotional, and motivational-behavioral components of the adolescents’ ideas of death. It is shown that in the process of becoming a teenager, the cognitive component undergoes certain changes from understanding death as a transition to a different state to realizing the absolute finiteness of existence. At the same time, changes in the value-semantic sphere become of particular importance, when, maintaining the fear of death as the content of emotional component, the hedonistic type of attitude to life comes to the fore, focusing on the feelings of significance and value of life. A mature understanding and attitude to death includes the awareness of irreversibility of the cessation of the body and psyche functioning, the universality and causality of this process.

Conclusion. Ideas about death develop with age and differ significantly in younger and older adolescence. The “maturation” of the death concept, awareness of the relationship between life and death is accompanied by the experience of an existential crisis and, as a result, can become a prerequisite for the formation of maladaptive (auto-aggressive) forms of behavior.

Background. The study considers the features of manifestation of the latent social groups (implicit, hidden, not declared, not supported by social structures and institutions) as a special socio-psychological phenomenon.

Objective. The study had its purpose to reveal the features of the social environment as potential conditions for the formation, functioning and evolution of the latent social groups. Hypotheses: 1) There are pre-forms of social associations of people (which can be conditionally called “latent social groups” (LSG)). 2) Emergence of LSG can have grounds in different conditions of external and internal environment of the subject (including those of the social environment perceived by a person as subjectively significant for him in relation to certain life goals).

Methods: categorical-theoretical analysis, study of literary sources, empirical research (questionnaires), multivariate methods of parametric statistics. By means of the author’s methodology (questionnaire “Dynamics of professional life style” — DPLS), respondents assessed the role of social environment conditions as “professional factors”, the dynamics of their own professionalism since their 20 to 65 years (retrospectively to the current age and prospectively — predicting the dynamics of subsequent evolution). Socio-demographic and job characteristics of the respondents were also recorded.

Sample. 482 people were interviewed, men and women aged 30–50 (132 civil servants, 129 engineers and heads of departments of industrial enterprises, 221 managers). The total sample was repeatedly divided into groups according to research tasks. The division criteria were gender, job position of the subjects, conditions of the meso-environment subjectively perceived to be significant as the factors of their professionalism (circumstances, science, art, religion).

Results. The empirical study results support the initial hypotheses. When dividing the sample according to different criteria, both obvious (men/women, specialists/managers) and environmental conditions assessed as “professionalism factors”, the obtained groups differ significantly in a number of variables.

Conclusions. In the same social space-time, various social associations can coexist different in the degree of their manifestation, development, active functioning as social groups. The phenomenon of “latent social groups” (LSG) appears to be a pre-form of manifested social groups with different trajectories of their possible subsequent development. LSG are possible associations of people who are similar to each other in a number of important aspects of life (value orientations, lifestyle, etc.), potentially capable of integration and interaction in achieving common goals, comfortable interpersonal communication, maintaining typical patterns of behavior, etc. LSG represent the pre-stages of the possible formation and development of various social structures.