Book
Предмет и метод психологии
The article justifies perspectives of studying thought genesis on the intersection of psychology of thinking and cultural psychology of personality. The model of features of mature thought is presented based on the synthesis of general psychological ideas of thinking and cultural data of thinking life of the personality. The features include problem orientation, operational complexity and notional richness of the thought. The interpretation of texts as a method of cultural psychology of personality is presented as able to enrich with unique facts and phenomena the psychological approaches to the problem of thinking, expand the cultural genesis context of this problem and expand and individualize psychological approaches to it.
The paper treats the issue of identity of the ego, which constitutes the central problem of personology. The skeptical approach to this problem, which sees it as not being subject to be resolved by means of science, began with D. Hume's work. Contemporary personologists (P. Ricoeur and others) approach this problem through study of culture, which imparts the ego with «narrative identity». Cultural historic psychology is a «Bridge of interpretations», upon which philosophy of culture meets psychology, and psychological data associated with «personality» are interpreted on the basis of some specific cultural philosophic theory. The «conflict of interpretations» plays and essential role in personology, which participates in the processes of emergence and overcoming of the cultural crisis. Philosophical and methodological problems that define the near term perspective development of personology are formulated: whether there are any «ego invariants» that remain regardless of any possible cultural determination; whether the ego possesses any rigidity in relation to cultural determination and, if it does, what is the nature of this rigidity; whether ego identity is destroyed when cultural determination diminishes or ceases, etc.
The understanding of the personality crisis as an internal resource for self-development is reasoned. A comparative analysis of personality crisis, crisis situation and features of psychological assistance was performed. A model of psychological support in the short-term counseling is proposed that facilitates the constructive resolution to the personality crisis. The question of psychological sense of the crisis becomes the basis for intervention. The importance of the phenomenological method as a basis for counseling is underlined and the concepts of intervention and understanding psychology are compared.
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.