Problems of Psychology in the 21st Century

3

Authors: Editorial Board

Contents, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2015, PPC

6-13

Authors: Tahir Y. Bazarov, Vladimir S. Karapetyan, Srbui R. Gevorgyan

Nowadays, nearly all the specialists have to operate in unpredictable situations. The group leader has to be capable to realize effective group performance. As it has been already mentioned (Bazarov, Shevchenko, 2013), “The post-crisis era executive leader should possess such important traits as self adjustment; common sense in combination with intuition, emotions, and imagination; and the readiness to make choices in fifty-fifty situations. The most general definition of “self-adjustment” is the building of functional interconnections between (1) a subject’s actions and state and (2) the actions and state of the surrounding setting. Building such interconnections allows for introducing relevant and purposeful changes in the subject’s actions, depending on the feedback from the previous step. In other words, this is an algorithm of changes based on feedback. ”. So in our opinion, a framework is needed that integrates existing team leadership research and the full range of ways in which leadership can manifest itself within the team. 1. Four types of organization of joint activities predict the facet of the organizational culture 2. Four types of organizational culture give rise to four types of working groups 3. Four types of organizational culture assume four types of leadership as well 4. The essential difference between these cultures is determined by those forms of organization of joint activities which underlies them.

20-25

Authors: Agnieszka Siedler

The usefulness of group social skills training in Autism Spectrum Disorder therapy has been well established. However, little is known about the group dynamics of this kind of intervention. The current multiple case studies were conducted to demonstrate that, despite of the functioning specifics of participants with ASD, processes associated with the dynamics of the group during group social skills training session may be noticeable. Intervention groups consisted of fifteen adolescents and preadolescents with high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders aged between 11 to 17 years old divided into three training groups. The social skills training sessions were conducted on a weekly basis. The observation lasted for six months and it included the formation of the group, the period of stability and unexpected changes. After each group session, the therapists filled in a detailed report about the participants’ behavior and interactions between participants. Collected data were carefully analyzed for group dynamic features. It was noticed that adolescents participating in group interventions are susceptible to the influence of the group, take different individual roles and are moderately sensitive to changes in the group structure. The influence of the disorder characteristics on group dynamics was also observed. Although the results show that group dynamics can be observed at a group training for ASD, the need for further structured observation should be emphasized as a current study constituted the first approach to the subject. Preliminary study: Benefits and challenges for participants beyond social skills obtaining are discussed.

45-56

Authors: Guna Svence, Maris Majors

Resilience and positive thinking, resilience and optimism, kindness as value could be the factors which could impact the future of our humanity and Earth as well as health and welfare of society. There is an active process of research in the positive psychology carried out in Latvia within the last ten years. The most important category of positive psychology is resilience and well-being. A lot of work has been done regarding adaptation of the concept of well-being and resilience in Latvia. There is a group of young researchers (master level students) who have made a contribution to adaptation of the concept of resilience and well-being in the science of psychology in Latvia at Riga Teacher Training and Education Management Academy (RTTEMA). A group of professors have recently made a joint research, where different samples of adults are demonstrated among the Latvian population in this article. The idea of this research is to analyse the collected secondary data on different groups of adults concerning correlation between the aspects of well-being and resilience. The aim of the research is to investigate the dimension of well-being in cognitive, eudaimonistic, hedonistic, interpersonal and spiritual (transcendent) relationship with resilience indicators - self-perseverance, self-reliance, acceptance of life, as well as the relevance of well-being indicators to age. One statement of this analysis was the hypothesis about the age as a factor which predetermines development of well-being and resilience. Methods- 1) Questionnaire on well-being (Majors, Majore, Svence, 2009), 2) Resilience scale, RS (Wagnild, Young, 1993), linguistically adapted by I. Bērziņa, G. Svence, 2011), 3) correlation and hierarchical regression analysis of the secondary data. Questions of the research: 1) what kind of correlation does exist between the indicators of well-being and resilience? 2) which well-being indicators predict these resilience indicators? 3) is there any correlation between the age and well-being? A data analysis is made in two parts within the framework of this research. Part 1 is dedicated to the examination of the research questions: 1) what kind of correlation does exist between the indicators of well-being and resilience? and 2) which well-being indicators predict these resilience indicators?, people of the Latvian population aged from 16 to 65 years were selected, 28.3% of men (N=184, M=32.1, SD=11,0 years), which was made using the secondary data of two studies (Madžule, 2013; Tauriņa, 2013). Part 2 of the research deals with the examination of the research questions 3) is there any correlation between the age and well-being?, people aged from 16 to 65 years were chosen, 24.5% of men (N=351, M=34.4, SD=11.5), which was made using the secondary data of three studies (Majors & Majore, 2009; Madžule, 2013; Tauriņa, 2013). It was found out, that the indicators of well-being have a direct and a rather close correlation with the indicators of resilience which provided the answer to the research question, what kind of correlation between the indicators of well-being and resilience exists. The indicators of the well-being dimension indicators have a little or rather close correlation with the parameters of the resilience dimension(0.29