Social and physiological peculiarities and professional orientation of medical students

The article describes personality features, self-regulation patterns and professional orientation of medical students. It represents the results of the study conducted among the fourth year students. The sample is characterized with high enough behavior regulation, extraversion, high learning potential, flexible thinking, following intuition and personal opinion in profession choice. High anxiety as personality feature and stress vulnerability is typical for female students; independence tendency is typical for male students.

Creative Personality Profile in Social Sciences: The Leading Role of Autonomy

The literature on creativity has often focused on the analysis of artists and scientists. The ability to generalize these findings to respective professional sub-disciplines is examined. In particular, the present study addresses the generalizability of the personality profile of creative scientists to creative social scientists. Autonomy was found to be the most important personality feature for creativity in social sciences. These results suggest the importance of fostering an autonomous working style.

Notes on the Treatment of Anhedonia*

This paper discusses the concept of anhedonia defined as the inability to experience pleasure. Many authors have noted the presence of anhedonia as a personality feature in patients with schizophrenia and other disorders. Anhedonia apparently begins early in life in relation to pathological reactions within the core family. Many authors feel that anhedonia is closely associated with poor premorbid adjustment, interpersonal incompetence and chronicity, and mediates towards poor prognosis. The authors feel that interpretive forms of psychotherapy and psychoactive medication are not particularly effective in the treatment of anhedonic patients. They propose a selection of intellectual, physical and social activities as a more direct attack on this problem of anhedonia. Through these activities the patients are able to gain a tangible experience of pleasure while developing more effective interpersonal skills. The response of patients to activities also provides material for structured forms of psychotherapy and the combination and interaction of activity therapy and traditional psychotherapy is considered to be effective in many anhedonic patients.