Article
Authenticity, Social Context, and Well-Being in the United States, England, and Russia: A Three Country Comparative Analysis
The study investigated interrelationships among trait authenticity, context-specific authenticity,
and well-being in three samples drawn from England, the United States, and Russia. Six hundred and
twenty-eight adults participated: 196 from the United States, 240 from England, and 192 from Russia.
The overall sample consisted of 151 men and 477 women with a mean age of 27 years (range
= 18 to 56). Authenticity was rated both as a general trait and specific to four contexts: with
partner, parents, friends, and work colleagues. Well-being was measured using a measure of positive
mental health. English and American samples showed higher mean authenticity levels than
the Russian sample. In all three subsamples, within-subjects differences in the context-specific
ratings were in the same ordinal series; authenticity was rated highest with partner, followed by
friends and parents, and lowest with work colleagues. Context and country showed an interaction
in their effect on authenticity; United States and England were higher than Russia in partner,
friend, and parent contexts but not in the work context. Trait and context-specific authenticity
measures contributed unique and significant variance to a prediction of well-being in all three
subsamples.
The existing findings on the relationship between optimism and academic performance are rather contradictory. Two studies were undertaken to investigate thе relationship between attributional style, well-being, and academic performance. A new Russian-language measure of attributional style for positive and negative events (Gordeeva, Osin, Shevyakhova, 2009) with stability, globality, and controllability subscales was used. In the first study, optimistic attributional style for good events was associated with higher academic achievement in high school students (N=225) and mediated the effect of academic performance on self-esteem. In the second study, pessimistic attributional style for negative events predicted success in passing three difficult written entrance examinations in university entrants (N=108), and optimistic attributional style for good events predicted success with success expectations as a mediator. The results indicate that attributional styles for positive and negative events are not uniform in their relationship to performance in different academic settings and to well-being variables.
Positive Psychology has become a major approach to the scientific study of individual, social, community and cultural processes. This book includes a selection of papers presented at the 3rd European Conference on Positive Psychology, organized in Braga at the University of Minho, Portugal in 2006. The title of the book reflects its main purpose and a main concern for positive psychology - Understanding Positive Life - balanced between the two scientific pillars, the research and the practice. Several contributions concerning theory, research and practice are presented in three different parts: Happiness, Well-being and Life Satisfaction (Part I); Performance, Coping and Quality of life (Part II); and assessment, Intervention and Practice for a Positive Life (Part III). Each part includes eight chapters, with a great diversity of authors coming from different countries.
In this study, the authors pinpoint the similarities and differences between students at a Russian university and a Swedish university regarding the students’ value systems. What similarities and what differences are there between male Swedish students and male Russian students, and what similarities and what differences are there between the female students in the two countries? The authors’ interest was directed towards the gender differences between the two countries. A method employing three phases was developed for analyses of the value systems in the two countries. Students, who, as a category, often challenge existing value systems, were chosen as informants. Student samples from each country, varying in number from 63 to 100 informants, provided data in the three sub-studies. The results indicated that similar national concepts, when translated into English, exposed significant differences in their connotations, a phenomenon which is discussed in relation to implications for intercultural communication. In particular, the concepts of democracy and gender equality are highlighted. Differences and similarities related to gender and nationality constitute the bulk of the discussion. A major finding was that concepts describing close interpersonal relations, such as friendship and love, were cross-nationally rated higher than values more distant from the individual’s private world, such as democracy and equal rights.
This article advances the idea of cultural and individual values being connected to each other not directly, but through the consciousness and activity, which presupposes the integral unity of cultural-historic methodological approach and the activity methodological approach in psychological researches. Activity effects mainly on forming of the consciousness and personality: it underlies them. In the cultural-historic approach such basis, in a way, a unit of analysis of consciousness and personality, is a value-oriented experience. The necessity of integration of the activity approach with cultural-historic approach lies in the integral ontology of psyche, behavior, activity, experience, sense, consciousness, personality, culture and its values.
In the article on the basis of the psycholinguistic experimental data obtained in 2009-2010 from Russian and Swedish students (the project on Swedish Institute grant) we consider internal features of several complex values (“Harmony”, “Freedom”, “Democracy”, “Tolerance” and “Patriotism”) and analyze their external systemic organization, taking into account both specificity of the two cultures and gender specifics. We argue that value concepts are hierarchically organized, forming different generalization levels from the simple to the more complex ones with intricate overlapping among different complex values within the system.
The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are classified in accordance with their hypothetical source. The general rule of the theory is also introduced. It contains the formal prediction of the particular distractor effect, based on entropy and redundancy measures from the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). Single- vs dual-process frameworks are considered for hypothetical mechanisms which underpin the distractor effects. Distractor profiles (DPs) are also introduced for the formalization and simple visualization of experimental data concerning the distractor effects. Typical shapes of DPs and their interpretations are discussed with examples from three frequently cited experiments. Finally, the paper introduces hierarchical hypothesis that states the level-fashion modulating interrelations between distractor effects of different classes.
This article describes the expierence of studying factors influencing the social well-being of educational migrants as mesured by means of a psychological well-being scale (A. Perrudet-Badoux, G.A. Mendelsohn, J.Chiche, 1988) previously adapted for Russian by M.V. Sokolova. A statistical analysis of the scale's reliability is performed. Trends in dynamics of subjective well-being are indentified on the basis the correlations analysis between the condbtbions of adaptation and its success rate, and potential mechanisms for developing subjective well-being among student migrants living in student hostels are described. Particular attention is paid to commuting as a factor of adaptation.