Acculturation is the process of group and individual changes in culture and behaviour that result from intercultural contact. These changes have been taking place forever, and continue at an increasing pace as more and more peoples of different cultures move, meet and interact. Variations in the meanings of the concept, and some systematic conceptualisations of it are presented. This is followed by a survey of empirical work with indigenous, immigrant and ethnocultural peoples around the globe that employed both ethnographic (qualitative) and psychological (quantitative) methods. This wide-ranging research has been undertaken in a quest for possible general principles (or universals) of acculturation. This Element concludes with a short evaluation of the field of acculturation; its past, present and future

Face perception and memory ("face cognition") are basic facets of social intelligence, and their development is a central topic for developmental science. Nevertheless, there is acute controversy over the issue of early or late maturation of these abilities. In addition, variance in face cognition abilities was ignored so far, leading to the absence of information, how children in a given age cohort differ in these abilities and making it impossible to investigate the association of face cognition abilities with general cognitive abilities; hence, the question about the specificity of face cognition abilities in childhood and adolescence remains open. Based on the earlier differential psychological studies of the structure of face cognition and variance in adulthood, within the current dissertation this approach was adopted to childhood and adolescence. Based on the results of 338 children and adolescents, the following conclusions were formulated: a) the individual differences approach allowed to establish the 2-factorial model of face cognition abilities (face perception and face memory) and to demonstrate invariance of this structure across childhood and adolescence; b) current approach allowed to demonstrate substantial age-related performance differences in both latent factors; c) although the level of maturation of face cognition is highly associated with general cognitive development, face perception and face memory are specific and have a social character compared to object recognition. The current dissertation contains a number of methodological recommendations related to the measurement of face cognition in childhood and adolescence, most important - the development of multivariate measurement.

This book consists of previously unpublished manuscripts by Vygotsky found in the first systematic study of Vygotsky’s family archive. The notebooks and scientific diaries gathered in this volume represent all periods of Vygotsky’s scientific life, beginning with the earliest manuscript, entitled The tragicomedy of strivings (1912), and ending with his last note, entitled Pro domo sua (1934), written shortly before his death. The notes reveal unknown aspects of the eminent psychologist’s personality, show his aspirations and interests, and allow us to gain insights into the development of his thinking and its internal dynamics. Several texts reflect the plans that Vygotsky was unable to realize during his lifetime, such as the creation of a theory of emotions and a theory of consciousness, others reveal Vygotsky’s involvement in activities that were previously unknown, and still others provide outlines of papers and lectures. The notes are presented in chronological order, preceded by brief introductions and accompanied by an extensive set of notes. The result is a book that allows us to obtain a much deeper understanding of Vygotsky’s innovative ideas. 

This book offers a comparative analysis of value and identity changes in several post-Communist countries. In light of the tremendous economic, social and political changes in former communist states, the authors compare the values, attitudes and identities of different generations and cultural groups. Based on extensive empirical data, using quantitative and qualitative methods to study complex social identities, this book examines how intergenerational value and identity changes are linked to socio-economic and political development. Topics include the rise of nationalist sentiments, identity formation of ethnic and religious groups and minorities, youth identity formation and intergenerational value conflicts

The key to the upliftment of the Adivasi community is a deep understanding of their culture, psychological resources and cognitive strengths. Ecology, Culture and Human Development: Lessons for Adivasi Education presents a comparative analysis of the cultural and cognitive dimensions of various communities in Canada, Ghana, China and India, and seeks answers from this analysis for Adivasi education. It debunks the myths of low intelligence and inferior cognitive capacity of the Adivasi community, and emphasizes the remarkable performance of Adivasi children when assessed in terms of their ecological and cultural contexts. Extensively illustrated and containing substantive data on all relevant aspects of human development, this book is a much-desired addition to the literature on this crucial aspect of social development in India. It is a comprehensive resource that aims to contribute substantially towards mitigating the travails of the Adivasi community and ensuring their social empowerment.

The general trend in Afghanistan is clear-cut: the overall security situation has consistently deteriorated since 2009, worsening dramatically since 2014. However, in the provinces of Afghanistan adjacent to Central Asia, the security situation has deteriorated even further than in Afghanistan as a whole. This report considers the range of options available to the Central Asian neighbors of Afghanistan (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) in responding to this growing threat, both unilaterally and in their bilateral engagement with actors in Afghanistan. Furthermore, it considers how decisionmaking processes in Central Asia will be affected by future developments in Afghanistan by assessing options and likely outcomes under a set of security scenarios in Afghanistan itself.

This textbook on Instructional Design for Learning is a must for all education and teaching students and specialists. It provides a comprehensive overview about the theoretical foundations of the various models of Instructional Design and Technology from its very beginning to the most recent approaches. It elaborates Instructional Design (ID) as a science of educational planning. The book expands on this general understanding of ID and presents an up-to-date perspective on the theories and models for the creation of detailed and precise blueprints for effective instruction. It integrates different theoretical aspects and practical approaches, such as conceptual ID models, technology-based ID, and research-based ID. In doing so, this book takes a multi-perspective view on the questions that are central for professional ID: How to analyze the relevant characteristics of the learner and the environment? How to create precise goals and adequate instruments of assessment? How to design classroom and technology-supported learning environments? How to ensure effective teaching and learning by employing formative and summative evaluation? Furthermore, this book presents empirical findings on the processes that enable effective instructional designing. Finally, this book demonstrates two different fields of application by addressing ID for teaching and learning at secondary schools and colleges, as well as for higher education.

Most books and articles still treat leadership and ethics as related though separate phenomena. This edited volume is an exception to that rule, and explicitly treats leadership and ethics as a single domain. Clearly, ethics is an aspect of leadership, and not a distinct approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership. This holds especially true for the for the military, as it is one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Military leaders have to deal with personnel who have either used or experienced violence. This intertwinement of leadership and violence separates military leadership from leadership in other professions. Even in a time that leadership is increasingly questioned, it is still good leadership that keeps soldiers from crossing the thin line between legitimate force and excessive violence

This report presents the results of an ESRC-funded research project that examined the behavioural and attitudinal impacts of the English plastic bag charge that was introduced in October 2015. The project used a mixed-methods longitudinal approach, and included a national survey, a diary-interview study, and supermarket observation study. Overall, the research has shown that the English plastic bag charge has made a strong and positive impact on people’s behaviours and attitudes. The research found that the charge was eff ective at breaking old habits, and that it became more popular as people adapted to the policy. Evidence was also found that the charge increased environmental awareness and the acceptability of other environmental policies. The success of the plastic bag charge in eff ectively changing plastic bag use and increasing support for other charges to reduce waste suggests that similar policies could also be successfully implemented, such as a deposit return scheme on plastic bottles or a charge on disposable coff ee cups.

Background and aims. This research reported here presents findings from an evaluation of the development and implementation of the Healthy Community Challenge Fund (otherwise known as the ‘Healthy Towns’ programme). A key aim of the research has been to inform the development of future environmental and systems‐based ‘whole town’ approaches to obesity prevention. The overall aim of the Healthy Towns programme was to pilot and stimulate novel ‘whole town’ approaches that tackle the ‘obesogenic’ environment in order to reduce obesity, with a particular focus on improving diet and increasing physical activity. Through a competitive tender process, nine towns were selected that represented urban areas across England ranging from small market towns to areas of large cities. The fund provided £30 million over the period 2008‐2011, divided amongst the nine towns. The amounts awarded ranged from £900,000 to £4.85 million. Towns were instructed to be innovative and were given freedom to develop a locally‐specific programme of interventions. This report supplements local process and impact evaluations undertaken by each town (not reported here) by taking an overall view of the programme’s development and implementation. Our evaluation therefore addressed the following research questions: 1. What kinds of interventions were delivered across the Healthy Towns programme? 2. Were environmental and infrastructural interventions equitably delivered? 3. How was the Healthy Towns programme theorised and translated into practice? 4. How was evidence used in the selection and design of interventions? 5. What are the barriers and facilitators to the implementation of a systems approach to obesity prevention?

Crisis is a burning issue; this is not a phenomenon, which can be conquered forever. Current approach to crisis is an optimized collaboration, which allows for manageable, measurable and predictable software development. Crisis is a new reality to live and work with. The current software development crisis dates back to the 1960s. The root cause of crisis is misbalance between resources and options. Understanding the nature of crisis helps to understand the reasons for the future crises.

This book is a navigator in lifecycle models, methodologies, principles and practices for predictable and efficient software development in crisis, i.e. under rapid requirement changes, resource deficit and other uncertainties. Therefore, the starting chapters suggest the major approaches to software development and their applicability in crisis. Further narration is case-based; it involves large-scale software implementations in different industries and knowledge transfer processes in IT education. The book suggests a set of principles that potentially marry the client’s and the developer’s views of the future software product in order to avoid or to mitigate the crisis.

The book will be helpful for students, postdocs, theorists and practitioners in software development. It suggests approved principles and practices of crisis management for software development.

The aging of the Russian population and the rapid shrinking of its labor force in coming decades will make the human capital each worker contributes increasingly vital for sustaining economic output and growth. While improvements in general education are necessary to build the foundation for a productive future labor force, a broad-based and effective system of adult education can provide second-chance opportunities for current workers to enhance their productivity and lengthen their working lives and for low-skilled immigrants to be integrated into the workforce. How well the Russian Federation addresses these multiple needs at and beyond the workplace will depend on how effective its adult education system is. This study targeting policymakers outlines the problems of Russia's growing skills gap, especially the shortage of higher-order cognitive and socio-emotional skills, and examines the current state of adult education.

The phenomenon of self-disclosure can be considered at different levels of scientific exploration being approached either from the socio-psychological viewpoint or from the individually determined personal perspective, where the subject of openness may serve as an individual with his personal potential in the field of social communications, and social groups or corporations as well. At the level of communicative dialogue and interpersonal relationships self-disclosure is manifestation of human potential capabilities and his readiness for open and trusting cooperation in society. In practical terms, handling these issues can be referred to as a social order from the part of the representatives of those professions where comfortable social communication appears to be an important factor of communicative competence and professionalism of the person.

Cognitive Control, Communication and Perception: Psychological and Neurobiological Aspects (CCCP 2014) workshop proceedings (Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia, December 4-6, 2014)

Objectives: Despite being often overlapped and used interchangeably in academic literature, loving-kindness meditation (LKM) and compassion meditation (CM) are also seen to have their distinct features. As a differential approach towards LKM and CM can promote a more accurate integration of these practices into the clinical field, it is worth studying their differential effects. The present pre-registered study, thus, aimed to experimentally compare effects of single-session LKM and CM on first-time practitioners' emotions. 

Methods: Two hundred and one university students were randomly allocated to three (LKM, CM and control) groups. The self-reported emotions were measured twice, before and after completing an assigned task. 

Results: (1) Both LKM and CM significantly increased other-focused positive emotions compared with the control condition; (2) Both LKM and CM increased happiness and overall positive emotions, and decreased sadness; however, the effect sizes of LKM were consistently larger compared to those of CM; (3) Both LKM and CM significantly increased low arousal positive emotions compared with the control condition.

ConclusionsLKM and CM represent two theoretically different practices. However, as they belong to the same tradition of meditation, they are similar in their intention of forming positive wishes towards self and others, and this appeared to have a positive effect on practitioners’ emotional experience. At the same time, LKM was found to be more effective in evoking positive emotions in first-time practitioners, compared to CM. 

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between face concerns, articulated (upward) dissent and organizational assimilation. In this study, articulated dissent was conceptualized as a type of dissent. A questionnaire was distributed to 370 working adults in the USA via Qualtrics. The questionnaire measured five face concerns, namely, self, other and mutual-face, articulated dissent and organizational assimilation. Before hypothesis testing, each measure was subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis to ensure that the hypothesized factor structure held. Pearson correlation and ordinary least squares estimation were used to test the hypotheses. Conceptualizing dissent as a type of conflict, the findings of the current study are as follows: self-face and assimilation are positively correlated, other-face and assimilation are positively correlated, mutual-face and assimilation are positively correlated, assimilation and articulated dissent are positively correlated and organizational assimilation mediated the relationship between mutual-face and articulated dissent. Theoretically, the self-presentation process (face) is more critical as a person becomes part of an organization; it is through assimilating into an organization that members become familiar with the norms of an organization and more comfortable dissenting to their superiors (articulated dissent); and the more the authors integrate with the work colleagues the more the authors engage in mutual face-saving. The results of this study demonstrate that self-presentation is critical as a person becomes part of an organization, particularly when it comes to managing conflict. This is the first study to link facework with organizational dissent. The results add to the understanding of how face affects whether we choose to express this kind of conflict behavior.

We move our eyes roughly three times every second while searching complex scenes, but covert attention helps to guide where we allocate those overt fixations. Covert attention may be allocated reflexively or voluntarily, and speeds the rate of information processing at the attended location. Reducing access to covert attention hinders performance, but it is not known to what degree the locus of covert attention is tied to the current gaze position. We compared visual search performance in a traditional gaze-contingent display, with a second task where a similarly sized contingent window is controlled with a mouse, allowing a covert aperture to be controlled independently by overt gaze. Larger apertures improved performance for both the mouse- and gaze-contingent trials, suggesting that covert attention was beneficial regardless of control type. We also found evidence that participants used the mouse-controlled aperture somewhat independently of gaze position, suggesting that participants attempted to untether their covert and overt attention when possible. This untethering manipulation, however, resulted in an overall cost to search performance, a result at odds with previous results in a change blindness paradigm. Untethering covert and overt attention may therefore have costs or benefits depending on the task demands in each case.

Background: Subcultures often develop distinct fashion style, which eventually becomes their “trademark” and represents the culture. In post-soviet countries, “gopniks” are one of the most prominent subcultures that is also present in popular media. Nevertheless, it is unknown to which extent the established image of “gopniks” in common knowledge can influence low-level perceptual processes such as search asymmetry. Objective: Our aim was to examine the influence of specific features of “gopnik” image on visual search. Design: We conducted two experiments to investigate familiarity and threatening of the “gopnik” features. In experiment 1, participants had to find a man-like stimuli in two conditions: a man-like silhouette with vertical stripes on his trousers among similar figures, but with horizontal stripes and vice versa. In experiment 2, participants had to search for the same stripes pattern only (but without man-like silhouette). Conditions were the same as in the first experiment. The experiment 3 was conducted in order to replicate results from previous two experiments with better control. Results: Overall, our results demonstrated visual search asymmetry for man-like (with horizontal stripes on trousers) and gopnik-like (with vertical stripes on trousers) objects, which could not be explained by the basic feature differences of these stimuli. Conclusion: We suggest that nowadays in Russia “gopniks” are perceived as a familiar group rather than dangerous subculture with real power. Their image was successfully transmitted to the general cultural background for post-soviet communities

Ensemble representations are often described as efficient tools when summarizing features of multiple similar objects as a group. However, it can sometimes be more useful not to compute a single summary description for all of the objects if they are substantially different, for example when they belong to entirely different categories. It was proposed that the visual system can efficiently use the distributional information of ensembles to decide whether simultaneously displayed items belong to single or several different categories. Here we directly tested how the feature distribution of items in a visual array affects an ability to discriminate individual items (Experiment 1) and sets (Experiments 2–3) when participants were instructed explicitly to categorize individual objects based on the median of size distribution. We varied the width (narrow or fat) as well as the shape (smooth or two-peaked) of distributions in order to manipulate the ease of ensemble extraction from the items. We found that observers unintentionally relied on the grand mean as a natural categorical boundary and that their categorization accuracy increased as a function of the size differences among individual items and a function of their separation from the grand mean. For ensembles drawn from two-peaked size distributions, participants showed better categorization performance. They were more accurate at judging within-category ensemble properties in other dimensions (centroid and orientation) and less biased by superset statistics. This finding corroborates the idea that the two-peaked feature distributions support the “segmentability” of spatially intermixed sets of objects. Our results emphasize important roles of ensemble statistics (mean, range, distribution shape) in explicit visual categorization.

Visual attention evolved in a three-dimensional world, yet studies on human attention in three- dimensions are sparse. Here we present findings from a human foraging study in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. We used a foraging task introduced in Kristjánsson et al. (2014) to examine how well their findings generalize to more naturalistic settings. A second goal was to examine what effect the motion of targets and distractors has on intertarget times, run patterns and foraging organization. Observers foraged for 50 targets among 50 distractors in four different conditions. Targets were distinguished from distractors by either a single feature (feature foraging) or a conjunction of features (conjunction foraging). Further, those conditions were performed both with static and moving targets and distractors. Our results replicate previous foraging studies in many aspects, with constant intertarget times during a “cruise-phase” within foraging trials and response time peaks at the end of foraging trials. Some key differences emerged, however, such as more frequent switches between target types during conjunction foraging than previously seen and a lack of clear mid-peaks during conjunction foraging, possibly reflecting that differences between feature and conjunction processing are smaller within 3D environments. Observers initiated their foraging in the bottom part of the visual field and motion did not have much of an effect on selection times between different targets (intertarget times, ITT’s) or run behaviour patterns except for the end-peaks. Our results cast new light upon visual attention in three-dimensional environments and highlight how 3D virtual reality studies can provide important extensions to two-dimensional studies of visual attention.

A vast amount of research has been carried out to understand how humans visually search for targets in their environment. However, this research has typically involved search for one unique target among several distractors. Although this line of research has yielded important insights into the basic characteristics of how humans explore their visual environment, this may not be a very realistic model for everyday visual orientation. Recently, researchers have used multi-target displays to assess orienting in the visual field. Eye movements in such tasks are, however, less well understood. Here, we investigated oculomotor dynamics during four visual foraging tasks differing in target crypticity (feature-based foraging vs. conjunction-based foraging) and the effector type being used for target selection (mouse foraging vs. gaze foraging). Our results show that both target crypticity and effector type affect foraging strategies. These changes are reflected in oculomotor dynamics, feature foraging being associated with focal exploration (long fixations and short-amplitude saccades), and conjunction foraging with ambient exploration (short fixations and high-amplitude saccades). These results provide important new information for existing accounts of visual attention and oculomotor control and emphasise the usefulness of foraging tasks for a better understanding of how humans orient in the visual environment.

Anne Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory (FIT) is a landmark in cognitive psychology and vision research. While many have discussed how Treisman’s theory has fared since it was first proposed, it is less common to approach FIT from the other side in time: to examine what experimental findings, theoretical concepts, and ideas inspired it. The theory did not enter into a theoretical vacuum. Treisman’s ideas were inspired by a large literature on a number of topics within visual psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and visual neurophysiology. Several key ideas developed contemporaneously within these fields that inspired FIT, and the theory involved an attempt at integrating them. Our aim here was to highlight the conceptual problems, experimental findings, and theoretical positions that Treisman was responding to with her theory and that the theory was intended to explain. We review a large number of findings from the decades preceding the proposal of feature integration theory showing how the theory integrated many ideas that developed in parallel within neurophysiology, visual psychophysics, and cognitive psychology. Our conclusion is that FIT made sense of many preceding findings, integrating them in an elegant way within a single theoretical account.

This paper presents a study in the format of general personology that involves an interpretation of ideas about personality explicated from cultural sources, in psychological concepts, methods of individual self-cognition and empirical approaches. A continuum of personological methods was applied that follows the selected format, including the hermeneutic method, the theoretical modeling method, and the method of constructing reflexive practices. The author puts forward the idea of the I-Other inner dialogue as an essential intrapersonal condition for the development of the I’s self-identity. In the concept of self-identity, its “achievement” is emphasized as the way in which the I’s tendency to maintain “self” meets the I’s challenges to “part with self” and to gain self-identity on a new level. The specifics of the original approach consisted in identifying mutually necessary oppositions that determine the paradoxes of self-identity that are “removed” when it is achieved. These oppositions include: I and the Other, the Real Other and the Inner Other, the I’s self-sufficiency and the need for dialogs with others, the attitude to self and the attitude to the Other, self-identity anddisdentification of the I with itself, the Other’s reflection and “viewpoint”, and the I for itself and the I for the Other. The “idea of the opposition” was applied to propose a structure for a developing dialogue focused on the multidimensional reflective disclosure of the I in relation to the Other from the position of the I-myself and from the position of the Inner Other. It is substantiated that such a dialogue (fulfilled by a person) can enrich and strengthen the self- identity of the I through the problematization and synthesis of I-representations obtained from these standpoints. The author’s idea was developed in the form of a continuum “hermeneutic model – theoretical model – reflexive model” that can be used in research and implementation of opportunities for the I’s self-identity achievement in the inner dialogue.

Vecchione et al. (2015) demonstrated effects of four higher-order values on political participation across 20 European countries. In their Study 1, they found that political participation was related positively to self-transcendence and openness to change values while negatively to conservation and ambiguously to self-enhancement values. Moreover, these effects were stronger in more democratic countries. The current study attempted a replication of the Vecchione et al.’s Study 1 using more rigorous modeling approach. The multilevel structural equation models with latent variables for both participation and basic values replicated the main effects of self-transcendence and conservation values but demonstrated a negative effect of openness values (vs positive in the original study), a positive effect of self-enhancement values (vs ambiguous or insignificant in the original study), and counter-intuitive cross-level interactions pointing to a lower effects of values in more democratic countries (vs the opposite in the original study). Overall model fit and explanatory power was much larger in the models with less assumptions. These discrepancies resulted mostly due to the original study’s implicit assumption that basic values’ measurement errors were zero. The new results have an important substantive contribution as they indicate a counter-intuitive similarity of effects of the supposedly opposite values. I suggest that self-transcendence – self-enhancement is a politically activating value dimension, whereas openness to change – conservation is a dimension that discourages political participation regardless of a preferred extreme.

Three studies conducted in the U.S. and Russia examine a novel pathway by which the perseverance component of the personality trait grit might predict college students’ behavioral persistence when solving challenging math problems. Specifically, we focus on the intervening role of what we refer to as math determination, which captures students’ perceived tendency to persevere on challenging math problems. Across studies, we found that math determination was correlated with behavioral math persistence, whereas grit was not. Despite there being no correlation between grit and math persistence, we found statistically significant indirect effects of grit on persistence through math determination in all three studies: the grittier students were, the more they viewed themselves as capable of persevering on challenging math problems, which ultimately predicted their math persistence at a later time point.

In the recent years facial emotion recognition algorithms have evolved and in some cases top commercial algorithms detect emotions like happiness better than humans do. To evaluate the performance of these algorithms, the common practice is to compare them with human-labeled ground truth. This article covers monitoring of the advancements in automatic emotion recognition solutions, and here we suggest an additional criteria for their evaluation, that is the agreement between algorithms’ predictions. In this work, we compare the performance of four commercial algorithms: Affectiva Affdex, Microsoft Cognitive Services Face module Emotion Recognition, Amazon Rekognition Face Analysis, and Neurodata Lab Emotion Recognition on three datasets AFEW, RAVDESS, and SAVEE, that differ in terms of control over conditions of data acquisition. We assume that the consistency among algorithms’ predictions indicates the reliability of the predicted emotion. Overall results show that the algorithms with higher accuracy and f1-scores that were obtained for human-labeled ground truth (Microsoft’s, Neurodata Lab’s, and Amazon’s), showed higher agreement between their predictions. Agreement among algorithms’ predictions is a promising criteria in terms of further exploring the option to replace human data labeling with automatic annotation.

The article presents the results of the selection of relevant to the Russian context emotions perceived as primary (which humans share with animals) or secondary (experienced only by humans). Three stages of the selection and evaluation of emotions made it possible to distinguish 12 emotions: primary positive emotions (Joy, Pleasure, and Interest), primary negative emotions (Anger, Irritation, and Rage), secondary positive emotions (Inspiration, Afflatus, and Enthusiasm), and secondary negative emotions (Disappointment, Regret, and Devastation). The results of confirmatory and multigroup confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that these emotions are well grouped into primary-secondary subgroups and that their valence is important to grouping. The highlighted emotions can be used to study implicit prejudices towards various social groups

The issue of actualization of labor interests as a motivational driver and one of the 9  sources of labor productivity is little-studied in applied and organizational psychology. The study 10  given in the paper fills some “blanks” of this problem. The leading approach to research is the 11  motivational system proposed on the basis of theoretical analysis and the developed psychological 12  model of labor interests. Using the methods of a special survey, questioning and interview guides, 13  the analysis and comparative assessment of the labor interests of 50 candidates for the  service 14  manager position  (entertainment and restaurant industry field)  was conducted; as well as of 45 15  employees of this industry aged 18 to 25. The main results of the paper show the connection of labor 16  interests with the company's personnel management system, namely with the processes of selection, 17  adaptation and training. It was revealed that the candidates who had been selected for the service 18  manager position were of primary group interest, and financial incentive was only in the second 19  place. At the same time, financial incentive contributed to the successful passage of the adaptation 20  period. Occupational interests of employees depended on their education and job specifics; career 21  interests were influenced by the time planned with the company. The recommendations necessary 22  for the employer to create the conditions corresponding to the leading labor interests of the 23  employees were substantiated. single paragraph of about 200 words maximum. For research articles, 24  abstracts should give a pertinent overview of the work. We strongly encourage authors to use the 25  following style of structured abstracts, but without headings: 1) Background: Place the question 26  addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study; 2) Methods: Describe briefly 27  the main methods or treatments applied; 3) Results: Summarize the article's main findings; and 4) 28  Conclusions: Indicate the main conclusions or interpretations. The abstract should be an objective 29  representation of the article, it must not contain results which are not presented and substantiated in 30  the main text and should not exaggerate the main conclusions. 

Bishop Berkeley suggested that the distance of an object can be estimated if the object’s size is familiar to the observer. The distance can be computed by comparing the size of the retinal image of the object to the memorized size of the object. It has been suggested that humans can perceive the distance of the object by using such “familiarity” information. However, prior experiments looking for an effect of familiarity had not been designed to minimize, or eliminate potential influences of: (i) higher cognitive factors on the observers' responses, or (ii) the influences of low-level image features in the visual stimuli. We tested the familiarity effect in two psychophysical experiments that were conducted both in Russia and in Japan. Forty Russian students and forty Japanese students participated in these experiments. The visual stimuli used were images of three coins in Russia and in Japan. The participants' depth perception was measured with a multiple-choice task testing the perceived depth-order of the coins. Our expectation was that any effect of “familiarity” on depth perception would only be observed with the coins of the participant's country. We expected a substantial effect of familiarity based on our meta-analysis of the "familiarity" effects observed in prior experiments. But, our results in both experiments showed that the familiarity effect on depth perception was virtually zero. Our experiments clearly show that familiarity, studied for the first time without any obvious confounds, does not serve as a cue for depth.

This study investigates the role of the climato-economic characteristics of 85 Russian regions in the formation of collectivism in those territories. Based on the results of previous research, the authors suggested that in regions with harsh climatic conditions, the richer population has a lower level of collectivism, whereas the poorer population has a higher level of collectivism. For testing these theoretical assumptions, we prepared a dataset with statistical data about each Russian region for the climatic demand (based on the temperature characteristics), monetary resources (the gross regional product (GRP)) and collectivism (the population natural growth, multi-generational households, marriages, divorces, etc.). We used correlation and moderation analyses where regional climate and GRP were the predictors of collectivism. The study demonstrated that these factors predicted the level of collectivism in regions. The study also revealed the moderating role of GRP in the relation between regional climatic conditions and the level of collectivist among the population, which allows the identification of the specific and universal relationships of the indicators.

This research is devoted to the study of the relationship between home country intercultural experience, intercultural competence and creativity among Russian students. We assume that students from culturally heterogeneous groups or/and student having the study course dedicated to intercultural issues are more creative, as cultural diversity and cultural learning are associated with a higher level of intercultural competence, and intercultural competence may be positively related to creativity.  The sample of the first study included 72 students and the sample of the second study included 272 students of the Higher School of Economics. Creativity was measured by the indicators of creative thinking (fluency, flexibility, and originality) via "Many instances game" from the creativity test battery of M. Runco; intercultural competence was measured via scales of "Assessment of intercultural competence" create in the project of A. Fantini & A. Tirmizi. Home country intercultural experience was operationalized via presence of students from other countries in the study groups and via inclusion of Cross-Cultural Psychology course into the students’ curriculum. The results of the first study show that cultural learning in the home country institution leads to the higher levels of creativity, while cultural heterogeneity of the groups is associated with an increase in creativity only when cultural learning was applied. The results of the second study show such components of intercultural competence as attitudes and adaptability of behavior play an important role in creativity of Russian students: attitudes are positively and adaptability of behavior is negatively related to creativity.  

Why are there various personality traits and why are those traits revealed in widely-acclaimed models such as the Big Five?  The Three-Dimensional Trait System (3D-TRASY) states that any personality trait can be defined in terms of three basic sources.  The first source represents traits’ variability with regard to the brain’s functioning in terms of bottom-up and top-down processes.  The second source connects to positive (rewards) and negative (punishments) social reinforcements of the trait.  The third source reflects a multitude of situations in which a trait may unfold.  Thus, Extraversion can be defined as a proximate bottom-up positive while Conscientiousness is a distal top-down positive.  3D-TRASY provides a framework for formal, non-tautological definitions of traits; it provides explanations for various phenomena in trait research including the super-traits of Stability and Plasticity and the maturity principle of lifespan development.  3D-TRASY presumes that some traits can occasionally closely correlate and thus establish an amalgam, which exemplifies itself in Eysenckian Psychoticism and the Big-Five’s Agreeableness.  In the history of trait research, this amalgamation may explain controversies that would have facilitated emergence of novel models such as the Big Five or HEXACO.  The paper contains empirical demonstrations on how 3D-TRASY can explain apparently empirical artifacts.

Whether short-term learning of new words can induce rapid changes in cortical areas involved in distributed neural representation of the lexicon is a hotly debated topic. To answer this question, we examined magnetoencephalographic phase-locked responses elicited in the cerebral cortex by passive presentation of eight novel pseudowords before and immediately after an operant conditioning task. This procedure forced participants to perform an active search for unique meaning of four word-forms that referred to movements of their own body parts. While familiarization with novel word-forms led to bilateral repetition suppression of cortical responses to all eight pseudowords, these reduced responses became more selectively tuned towards newly learned action words in the left hemisphere. Our results suggest that stimulus repetition and active learning of semantic association have separable effects on cortical activity. They also evidence rapid plastic changes in cortical representations of meaningful auditory word-forms after active learning.

In this study, we aimed to estimate the effect of phonological processing in the emergence of specific maths or combined maths and reading difficulties during the first year of schooling. We also estimated whether the high level of phonological processing could be a resource for coping with math difficulties. The study was conducted on a large sample of Russian first-graders (N=3296 pupils, mean age 7.3 years, 49% of them were girls). Pupils were tested twice, at the beginning and at the end of the first grade in their level of maths performance, reading performance, phonological processing, and number recognition skills. In each test, four groups of pupils were identified regarding their level of maths and reading performance: a group with mathematical difficulties only (MD), pupils with reading difficulties only (RD), pupils with both maths and reading difficulties (MDRD) and pupils without difficulties (TD). The probability to move into the MD group, the MDRD group and in the TD group was estimated for pupils regarding their group status at Time 1 and their level of phonological processing. Results revealed that at first grade, phonological processing did not correlate with specific maths difficulties, but associated with both maths and reading difficulties. At the same time, a high level of phonological processing may prevent typically developing pupils from moving into the MD group. Moreover, a high level of phonological processing increases the probability to move into the TD group for pupils who had specific maths difficulties at the start of schooling.

It is commonly believed that the visual system requires oculomotor information to perceive depth from binocular disparity. However, any effect of the oculomotor information on depth perception is too restricted to explain depth perception under natural viewing conditions. In this study, I describe a computational model that can recover depth from a stereo-pair of retinal images without using any oculomotor information. The model shows that, at least from a computational perspective, any oculomotor information is not necessary for perceiving depth from the stereo retinal images.

Psychological studies show the effect of mortality salience (MS) on attitudes and behavioral patterns in different spheres of social life, particularly, in intergroup relationships. This study examines the influence of MS on attitudes toward national outgroups. In line with terror management theory (TMT), previous studies indicate a contradictory impact of death-related thoughts. Reminders of death enhance unfavorable attitudes toward all national outgroups, however, MS reinforces the negative attitudes only toward unfriendly countries or toward those perceived as threatening. To shed light on the influence of MS, we conducted two experimental studies that were differentiated by MS manipulation and the specifics of the outgroups. In Study 1 we actualized the reminders of death through military news, whereas in Study 2 by the presentation of terrorism news (close and distant). In Study 1 (N = 180) we analyzed the impact of MS on attitudes toward Ukraine, Belarus, and Estonia. The results showed that MS mostly reinforced the unfavorable attitudes toward ‘unfriendly’ and ‘neutral’ countries. Study 2 (N = 242) focused on MS and attitudes toward Ukraine, Belarus, the USA, and China. The results indicated that MS enhanced negative attitudes toward Ukraine as an ‘unfriendly’ country. However, the close or distant terrorism-related content did not illustrate the specific influence on attitudes toward national outgroups.

Whether the motor cortex activation accompanying concrete verbs comprehension is necessary for verbs conceptual processing is still a hotly debated topic in the literature. Answering this question, we examined to what extent the more difficult access to verb semantics requires an additional engagement of cortical motor system in verb generation task. Using power suppression of MEG beta oscillations (15-30 Hz) as an index of sensorimotor activation, we presented to our participants the noun cues which either were strongly associated with a single verb and prompted the fast and effortless verb retrieval, or were weakly associated with multiple verbs and were more difficult to respond to. A whole-brain analysis of beta suppression revealed that the only cortical regions sensitive to the difficulty of semantic access were the higher order motor areas on the medial and lateral surfaces of the frontal lobe. This differential activation of cortical motor system accompanied effortful verb retrieval and preceded the preparation of vocal response for more than 500 milliseconds. Since the mid-frontal frontal brain areas are involved in maintaining abstract representations of actions during their initiating and planning, we argue that our finding supports the view that motor associations contribute to retrieval of verb semantics.

This paper investigates the characteristics of the affective component in the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE). Two approaches are considered – fluency attribution approach (FA) and affect as predictive efficiency approach (APE) – within a predictive coding framework. Using the artificial grammar learning and affective priming paradigms, we demonstrate that a violation of implicitly learned regularities elicits an automatic negative affective response. This result suggests that SMEE can be observed without any overtly evaluative judgment. Participants’ decisions on the grammaticality of stimuli did not change this pattern. We conclude that SMEE is based on the affective response to prediction errors made by the cognitive system and may include the fluency attribution process in the later stages of processing.

Expectations of people with high and low intelligence differ considerably. High intelligence is associated with several desirable social outcomes, while low intelligence is associated with low social status and poverty. We assumed that attributing high intelligence to a person could lead to a more positive evaluation of them and, as a result, less negative attitudes toward them. In the experimental study (N = 781) we investigated how levels of perceived intelligence impact the long-term stigmatization of dirty workers. The results show that perceived high intelligence of dirty workers decreases long-term stigmatization towards them, but these findings relate only to people performing moral dirty work. Implicit theories about intelligence were controlled as a covariate and had no significant effect. Results are discussed in terms of the positive effect of perceived high intelligence on everyday perception. Limitations and future directions are also discussed.