Interview with Rebecca Hope Dirksen

Isabel Machado interviews Rebecca Hope Dirksen on After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (2020). Interview date: Mar 17, 2021 Dr. Rebecca Dirksen is an ethnomusicologist working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora. Her research concerns cultural approaches to development, crisis, and disaster; sacred ecologies, diverse environmentalisms, and ecomusicology; and applied/engaged/activist scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding member of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT).

Professional Mobility as a Model for Overcoming Maladaptive Forms of a Person’s Psychological Defence in Conditions of Professional Development Crises

The article deals with the results of the analysis of the person’s professional mobility as a comprehensive tool for overcoming the professional crises. It also determines the existence of many unascertained psychological problems in its structure. One of these problems is the problem of overcoming maladaptive forms of a person’s psychological defence based on his professional mobility in stressful conditions of the professional development crises. Stressful uncertainty in the professional crisis and the high ambivalent tension, which the person is experiencing, characterize the specialist’s maladaptive development according to the “catastrophic” scenario. In the conditions of the professional development crisis a specialist cannot leave it adaptively and flexibly due to a limited number of rigidly patterned professional barriers and behaviour models. Such maladaptive patterned movement of a specialist towards the disintegrational destruction of the whole system of his professional development can be overcome constructively on the basis of his professional mobility model, selection and realization of the further professional movement vector. We consider the interactive strategy of a specialist’s behaviour for constructive overcoming professional crises in the system of his professional development, based on the development of the ability of directed transitions to new professional movement trajectories in the points of the system bifurcation, as the professional mobility.

Scientific approaches in Russian and foreign psychology to study the crisis of professional development of the individual

The article is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the scientific views of domestic and foreign scientists on the crises of human development as a person and a subject of activity. The essential signs of a crisis of professional development are indicated - a difficult, difficult situation; a process consisting of external and internal contradictions that a person overcomes thanks to the socio-cultural environment and formed personal qualities. The factors of influence on the crisis of professional development, types and stages of crises of professional development, strategies of human behavior to overcome contradictions, as well as ways to overcome the crisis are highlighted. Special attention in scientific research is paid to crises that disorganize individual human behavior: at the beginning of the formation of an individual as a professional, in connection with entering a new work collective or its disintegration, at the stage of completing a professional career. The periods of development crises are characterized. The stages of the professional development crisis are revealed. Comparisons of scientific judgments about the crisis of professional development of domestic and foreign scientists-psychologists and ways of overcoming the development crisis are given. The conclusion is formulated that, in addition to the negative consequences of the crisis of professional development, there is also a positive result in the form of further development of the personality as a professional.

Psychological diagnosis and gender analysis of teenagers’ addiction propensity

We consider the current issue of teenagers’ attitude to psychoactive substances. A comprehensive study of the value relationship of teenagers to psychoactive substances and the motivation for their use is necessary. The teenagers development crisis leads to a drop in academic performance, a decrease in working capacity, negativism, alienation, ambivalence of feelings and much more, it is noted that the demonstrative “adulthood” of teenagers, their acute experience of the discrepancy between the external and internal worlds often lead them to behavioral transformations aimed at remaking reality for themselves. Based on the types of deviations characterized in psychology, we analyze the causes of chemical addiction. In the course of the study, we identify the main reasons that encourage teenagers to try drugs and consider the age differentiation of the reasons. The main motives of alcohol consumption by teenagers are determined. The results of the study were analyzed by gender of the respondents, and the peculiarities of the attitude to psychoactive substances and persons who use the above substances were noted. We present an expert assessment of the risk of teenagers’ dependence on psychoactive substances, given by schoolteachers, and identify the main causes that affect the risk of developing addiction. We note the necessity of conducting psychological preventive work with this group of respondents and the environment.