European Journal of Psychological Studies

68-107

Authors: Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff

Every human discipline, including the social sciences, depends on a general theory of the human being. The article argues that developmental psychology is the most fundamental theory of the human being, more relevant than any other theory of the human being such as rational choice, behaviorism, psychoanalysis or whichever. The crucial role of developmental psychology both to the theory of the human being and to the humanities originates in the fact that the biggest part of the premodern humankind from the Stone Ages up to recent times occupied psychological stages typical for children aged 5 to 12, while only humans socialised in modern societies during the past few centuries or generations attained stages typical for the adolescent stage of formal operations. This process of psychogenetic advancement has by no means finished by now but is still running right across the globe, with backbenchers and frontrunners. Without this reference point the process of globalization, the problems of the developing and threshold countries, and the many cultural conflicts and crises are not explainable. Formerly great traditions of the humanities knew about the childish psyche of premodern or primitive man, especially between 1840 and 1940. Since the victory of the two main ideologies of our time, cultural relativism and universalism of mind, over the theory of developmentalism during the Seventies of the past century the knowlegde about the psychogenesis of humankind, accomplished by the prewar traditions, was almost totally lost. However, the two ideologies, born for political and not scientific reasons, have destroyed the foundations of the humanities right across the five continents and the disciplines. Their recovery is only possible by the installment of the theory of developmentalism as the fundamental theory of the human disciplines. It is necessary to restore the great prewar traditions and to improve them alike. This article shows that the structural-genetic theory programme, developed over the past 30 years, goes even beyond the fathers of developmentalism. It shows that developmental psychology explains the whole history of the humankind, the history of the human being, his mind and consciousness, the history of population, economy, society, politics, law, religion, philosophy, sciences, law, morals, violence, delinquency, manners, arts, literature, etc. Therefore, the new theory programme imparts to the human disciplines the fundamental theory evolutionary theory brought to biology, and quantum mechanics and relativity theory to physics.

120-132

Authors: Christopher R. Hallpike

Anthropologists have long recognized that there has been a development in moral thinking as societies increase in complexity from band societies to literate civilizations. The increasing range of moral concern, the development from shame to guilt, and the increasing importance of intention in assessing responsibility are examples. There are clear resemblances between these findings and Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, which have been validated cross-culturally. His stages of pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional thought providing important insights into the moral thinking characteristic of band societies, tribal societies, and literate civilizations. But it is also concluded that, especially at the more advanced stages of moral thinking, philosophical and religious beliefs about the world have a powerful influence on moral values that is distinct from cognitive development.

13-21

Authors: Izabela B. Kotova, Galina V. Lozovaya

The article presents the experience of work on the formation of ideas about safety. These representations are considered as a resource, the underlying security and self-sufficiency of the individual security. The basis of the article was a detailed description of the author's program, aimed at the formation of students of pedagogical college productive ideas about safety. A special feature of this program is the combination of actions by the concentration of educational material on health and safety in the disciplines of basic educational program, additional training courses on the psychology of health and safety and the organization of professional support student psychologist.

29-45

Authors: Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff

Norbert Elias and Steven Pinker maintain that human´s history manifests a pacification trend regarding both international and international relations. They describe a steady decline of violence and cruelty within families, villages, gender relations and child care on the one side and regarding sovereignties such as states and nations on the other side. Although institutional improvements are regarded as decisive to this pacification trend both authors earmark psychological transformations as even more crucial. Both authors describe that premodern humans are shaped by psychological structures that resemble to those of children, thus referring to the old tradition of comparing ontogeny and historical developments, widely spread in the pre-war era of social sciences. The article here describes that modern Piagetian cross-cultural psychology supports this view evidencing that premodern peoples do not develop the fourth stage of human development, the formal operations, to that depth and extent as modern humans do, due to the expansion of education and socialisation techniques in the past generations. This new theory, called structure-genetic theory programme, is able to explain the facts Elias and Pinker demonstrate in a surprising and convincing way. The conclusions that have to be drawn from these insights go far beyond the research of the history of violence and touch the foundations of man´s history on earth.

55-60

Authors: Olugbenro Solomon Olusegun, Lucas B. Ojo

The purpose of this study is to ascertain the relationship of teachers’ personality and peer pressure on adolescents’ personality development in Mainland Local Government of Lagos State, Nigeria. The research design for this study was survey. A representative fraction of the population of Mainland Local Government of Lagos State was used as sample. One hundred and fifty (150) teenagers whose age ranged from 11-19 from six randomly selected public and private secondary schools in Mainland Local Government Area of Lagos State were used. A four-point Likert type questionnaire was constructed for eliciting data for this study. Data were analysed using t- test. The study revealed that there is a significant relationship between peer pressure and adolescents’ personality development. It was recommended that teachers should be role models to students as they manipulate environmental factors to assist adolescents in their personality development.

58-66

Authors: Igor N. Kutovoy, Tatiana A. Syrova

The article considers Internet addiction as a one of the varieties depending of modern man. Internet addiction is treated as dependent entity of the finding of the Internet-based mostly use the computer and the smart-phone. The causes increased attractiveness of the Internet for young people are marked. It is shown that this dependence has significant psychological characteristics that have not been studied enough. The study was oriented on previously unexplored Internet connection depending on students’ needs and safety. Meanwhile, security is the basis of experience of the subject of protection and the preservation of them to achieve the main goal of life for him. The data about the features of the security needs of students with different levels of Internet addiction are represented. The comparison of the empirical results confirmed the differences in the values of safety of students, dependent and not dependent on the Internet. Approaches to overcome young people’s Internet addiction are proposed.

75-80

Authors: Aleksandr V. Lyakhov, Zhanna V. Tukova

The article raised the issue of experience of loneliness in the student's age. The features of experience of loneliness among students with different priorities of subjectivity security. Security is considered as an integral characteristic of the general perception of the world, generating a subjective assessment of the position of man in the existing system of relations. It was found that the most striking differences in the experience of loneliness typical for students at different time security priorities. Students for whom security is important in the future, the most exposed to loneliness than the students focused on the safety of the "here and now". Students for whom security is important in the present, the number of those who are prone to loneliness least. Recommendations to provide psychological assistance to students with a high level of experience of loneliness.

9-22

Authors: Evgeny V. Garin

Based on the theoretical and methodological foundation of the theory of psychological systems Klochko V.E. and Theories rigidity, fixed and giperfixed behaviors Zalewski G.V., the article qualitatively reinvented the approach to forming a hierarchy of human needs as an open psychological system: it has been presented a new definition of needs, their hierarchical relationship and the conditions for transition to the needs of a higher hierarchical level, reconstructed development of hierarchy of human needs. The construction of a new model of the hierarchy of needs provides the prerequisites for the creation of practical methods and techniques of psychological testing: testing the potential level of intelligence, testing, development of skills of professional fitness, psychological compatibility testing, as well as the development of procedures for monitoring territorial emotional and psychological state of the population on the analysis of the dynamics of search engine queries.

31-36

Authors: Svetlana S. Novikova, Svetlana A. Baranova

The article gives a comparative analysis of social representations of teenagers on normative behavior in different ethnic groups. It is concluded that there have been existed the differences in the rates of different ethnic groups: armenian, greek, georgian and russian cultures. For statistical validation of the results the extraction method of semantic universals has been applied.

128-141

Authors: Sribas Goswami

During the last 40 years, our society has shown an increasing concern with respect to mental illness as major social problem. But still today most of the people of this country cannot make out the differences between mentally retarded and mental – illness. Medical, social sciences have made a substantial beginning in the form of researches towards this direction. It has been observed that interest is growing rapidly with respect to the problem of mental retardation. Such rapid growth in interest is involving more and more researchers doing studies on mental retardation which is in terms producing a large accumulation of data on the general condition with which mentally retarded individuals are associated. The aim of the study is to focus on psychological problems like family burden, social support, marital quality of life, social stigma and self esteem in caregivers of intellectual disabled children and blind children.

156-167

Authors: Oleg Lukyanov, Yana Chastokolenko, K. Kotikova

The research objective was to educe the main trends of remythologization of freedom and self-identity in creative youth subcultures. The sense of understanding and revelation of these trends is connected with the changes in different areas of transit, formation and accumulation of human potential in particular in the area of education and leisure. Without going into detail analysis of the modern world's demythologization, we have supposed that creative youth subcultures are the social and psychological answer of the youth to the current situation of illusiveness of the freedom of choice imperative that rules the mass culture. Why don't creative youth subcultures' participants limit themselves only to reading books? How do they choose freedom in creative youth subcultures? They play. The game gives them the opportunity to feel "the breath of archetypical form", to fulfill the character's description with their own life, and then the character (as in Tolkien's world) lives "on his own". There are three main myths which construct the conscience of a modern person. These are myths about Prometheus, Sisyphus and Narcissus. These myths are transformed by creative youth subcultures' participants into life grounds for their self-identity, in other words, there is a process of remythologization, and a myth is restored as a basis of life understanding. The logic of character's life is tripartite, it unites personal features of a player, a gameplay and an archetype. A player automatically actualizes the archetype by accepting the gameplay. The game logic and cultivated individuality of a person "turn" the archetype to its rising, sacred vector. There is a bright feature in subcultural reality of tolkienists. They actualize archetypes which combine personal problems of players and deep problems connected with Russian mentality. The participant even tell about "archetypical therapy". A typical result of "archetypical therapy" is transformation of negative "energy" of archetypes into positive. The most common variant is that negative, which is typical for the archetype, is "isolated" in subcultural reality and doesn't interfere the life. We suppose that the study of remythologization psychology should be continued, among other things in the perspective of changings in education strategies from project games, which are customary nowadays, to subculture forming games.

174-180

Authors: O. Austin Omomia, T. A. Omomia

B. F. Skinner’s theory of reinforcement emphasizes on the relevance of reward and punishment. This has impacted, to a large extent on the promotion of teaching and learning. In effect, Skinner’s theory has been applied often in most educational institutions. Students’ educational outcomes can be improved upon on the basis of positive reinforcements. This paper therefore, examined the relevance of skinner’s theory of reinforcement on school evaluation and effective school management. The paper applied psychological and sociological methodology in its research design. There is immense value in reinforcement (positive or negative) as a means of feedback to students, teachers and administrators. It is recommended that adequate feedback should be given to teachers to improve their output. And learners should be rewarded in order to improve their educational outcomes.