Motivation, Will, Goal Setting and the Growth of Sportsmanship of Middle and Long Distance Runners

The article presents the results of a study aimed at analyzing the characteristics of the psychological organization of sports activities of middle and long distances runners. Based on a level analysis of sports activities, a questionnaire was developed and used to collect data to assess the characteristics of motivation, volitional and intentional-arbitrary goal-setting among athletes. Standardized methods were also used: “a questionnaire to identify the severity of self-control in the emotional sphere, activity and behavior”; “Scale of control over the action” by J. Kuhl; methods of self-assessment of the volitional qualities of a person; “The test of meaningful life orientations.” Calculations were made of the rank correlation between indicators on questionnaire scales and the level of sportsmanship in female and male samples. Significant directions of changes in motivation, goal-setting and volitional qualities in female and male samples were identified, as- sociated with the improvement of sports qualifications.

Mental States of a Personality in a Didactic VR Environment

The work is aimed at examining the influence of modern didactic programs in virtual reality (VR) on mental states in adolescence. The materials of empirical research obtained on a sample of 3—4 year students from Moscow and Smolensk universities are presented. Study 1 (N = 50) involved respondents aged 19 to 26 years. We used the methodology of AS Kulikov L.V., didactic VR programs were used as instructive independent variables. The results obtained indicate that the didactic VR environment of the highest level has a significant effect on mental states, increasing indicators on the scales of activation, excitement, tone, euphoria, and reducing asthenia. Conditions such as well-being, normal mood, calmness remain stable in immersive didactic VR. The effectiveness of VR programs in influencing mental states is determined by the successful modeling of 3D objects, high animation, interactivity, originally incorporated into the content of VR of the highest level. The data on an increase in the experience of the degree of presence in VR when using new helmets, even in short VR programs, are of fundamental importance. This indicates the possibility of the formation of addictions to VR with their repeated, short-term use.

Features of Recognizing Facial Expressions in Short Time Intervals: the Level of Anxiety and Professional Affiliation

The aim of this study was to investigate how differences in anxiety levels relate to selective sensitivity to basic emotions (emotional bias) with minimal exposure time. Masked pictures of happiness, angry, fear, disgust, surprise, sad and neutral facial expressions were presented to 298 men at exposure times in intervals 16ms, 34ms, 49ms, 66ms. After presenting each image, the participants chose on the screen by pressing a key the name of an emotion suitable, in their opinion, Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (TMAS) was used to measure of trait anxiety. There were subjects of various professional groups (firefighters, military, athletes, psychologists, mathematicians). We found that Selective sensitivity to basic emotions at exposure times up to 49ms is determined by internal interpolation of the perceiver’s personality. Highly anxious men are unconsciously more likely to choose fear, anger and disgust. The increase in anxiety are accompanied by decreased preference of anger and happiness. Low-anxious men unconsciously ignore fear, anger, disgust, and preferred neutral face. Men of different professions are differed in the level of anxiety and emotional bias in basic emotions. Firefighters have the lowest level of anxiety, mathematics have the highest.

Social and Emotional Skills of Student: the Development of the Tool for Monitoring in Secondary School

Measuring the personal aspects of development is a challenge that researchers and practitioners are facing. Despite the fact that the results regarding the socio-emotional development of students are recorded in federal educational standards of Russia, there is neither a theoretical framework suitable for assessing these results, nor re- liable measuring materials suitable for its monitoring assessment. This paper is aimed to develop a monitoring tool to estimate social and emotional skills of secondary-school students. The results of a field test were analysed using Item Response Theory (IRT). Construct validity, reliability, differential item functioning and other characteristics were checked. Psychometric properties of the tool as well as theoretical framework are presented. The tool has good psychometric quality and can be used to assess the development of social and emotional skills of adolescents.

Pandemic in the Context of on Environmental Consciousness

The article is directly related to the subject of common interest — COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly impacts the entire world community. In the paper, we consider the spread of coronavirus infection as one of the consequences of active use of the natural environment and its resources by humans. Psychologically, the current ecological crisis stems from the regularities of the human consciousness formation. The present study empirically examines the impact of the COVID-19 hazard estimation on the nature-human interaction assessment. The study involved 372 participants (42% men and 58% women), the mean age of the subjects was 33.9 years (SD = 11.4 years). The data obtained shows that the perception of COVID-19 as a serious disease is associated with the apprehension of nature as adverse for humans, fear of natural forces (F = 12.307; p < 0.001), — perceptions characterizing the archaic type of environmental consciousness. At the same time, younger people assess the negative impact of nature on humans significantly lower than the older respondents (chi-square = 14.041; p < 0.001), and at the same time, recognizing the danger of the coronavirus, they are concerned about the natural environment preservation, demonstrating an ecocentric type of environmental consciousness.

Implicit Learning of the Time Interval Sequence

The article considers the studies performed in the «Sequence Learning» paradigm. A special case of this experimental approach is the method of temporal sequences memorization. The elements of such sequences are time intervals instead of stimulus or their spatial localization. The item of the conducted and described study was implicit learning of the time interval sequence. The goal of the experiment was to check the possibility of unconscious acquisition of the temporal sequences, not related to the sequences of another type of organization. To process the obtained results, mixed linear models were used. It was found that the learning of time interval sequences can occur regardless of the presence of regularity in the reaction order (motor sequence) and without rules in stimuli organization (structural sequence) or in the order of their localization (spatial sequence).

Study of Sociality as a Personal Characteristic of a Leader: Construction of a Questionnaire and its Validation

The article discusses theoretical approaches to understanding sociality as a personal characteristic. The author’s definition of the concept of “sociability” is proposed, which is understood as a personality property that characterizes the degree of its involvement in the social microenvironment, due to the psychoemotional stability of the individual and manifested in his adaptive and perceptual-interactive skills. The author’s psychodiagnostic technique for measuring sociality as a personal characteristic is presented. A distinctive feature of this technique lies in the simplicity of the diagnostic procedure, in the ability to identify not only the current level of development of sociality, but also to determine the features of its structure in the subject. The article describes the main psychometric characteristics of the technique: constructive and convergent validity, discriminativeness, reliability, representativeness. In order to determine the convergent validity, a correlation was established between the scales of the author’s methodology and the methodology for diagnosing perceptual-interactive competence, as well as the VSC questionnaire («self-control» scale). The proposed author’s psychodiagnostic tools can be used to solve academic and applied problems in the field of personality psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, leadership psychology, organizational psychology and other areas of psychological science to determine the current level of development of sociality of the researcher at the age of 14 to 25 years.

The Impact of a Stranger’s Emotional Facial Expression on the Perception of His Personality

This study the role of emotional expressions of the sitter’s face in the perception of his personality traits. The scores given by observers on the scales of the “Personality Differential” for images of a calm face and the face of the same sitter, demonstrating six basic emotions, were compared. Forty-nine photographic images of the emotional states of seven sitters included in the RaFD database were used as stimulus material. A total of 193 Moscow university students (66 men and 127 women, mean age 23.3 years) participated in the experiment. A 17% statistically significant change in personality scores was recorded, two-thirds of which tended toward the positive poles of the scales. Changing perceptions of a person’s personality suggests a coherent relationship between emotion modality and personality traits. Each basic expression influences a specific group of 10-15 traits, and in different ways. Each trait relies on an affective configuration with its own specificity. Disgust has the maximum integrative influence on the view of the sitter’s personality. Joy causes extremely high positive changes, while sadness and astonishment cause moderate, symmetrical changes in the ratio of positive and negative shifts. Fear and anger lead to an equilibrium of positive and negative evaluations. The highest volume of trait changes is obtained for the “Activity” factor (A), which is associated mainly with positive shifts, the lowest volume is for the “Evaluation” factor (E), which is, together with the “Strength” factor (S), the main source of negative changes in the sitters’ perception. The volume of affective feature shifts is determined by the morphotype of the face and the individual stylistics of emotion expression. In everyday life, the possibility of affective changes in traits does not violate the general invariance of interpersonal perception.

Perception of Natural and Artificial Dynamic Facial Expressions During Stroboscopic Presentation

In an experimental study, we explored the role of the natural or artificial character of expression and the speed of its exposure in the recognition of emotional facial expressions during stroboscopic presentation. In Series 1, participants identified emotions represented as sequences of frames from a video of a natural facial expression; in Series 2 participants were shown sequences of linear morph images. The exposure speed was varied. The results showed that at any exposure speed, the expressions of happiness and disgust were recognized most accurately. Longer presentation increased the accuracy of assessments of happiness, disgust, and surprise. Expression of surprise, demonstrated as a linear transformation, was recognized more efficiently than frames of natural expression of surprise. Happiness was perceived more accurately on video frames. The accuracy of the disgust recognition did not depend on the type of images. The qualitative nature of the stimuli and the speed of their presentation did not affect the accuracy of sadness recognition. The categorical structure of the perception of expressions was stable in any type of exposed images. The obtained results suggest a qualitative difference in the perception of natural and artificial images of expressions, which can be observed under extreme exposure conditions.

Dynamics of Mental States of Learners Working with Didactic VR Programs Using Virtual Reality Technologies

The article presents the results of studying the mental states of adolescent students involved in the work using didactic VR programs implemented using VR technologies of different levels, demonstrated using different technical means (stationary PC, VIVE helmet), causing immersive experience of different quality. Before and after work, the participants were controlled: activation, excitement, tone, well-being; mood, asthenia, euphoria; the severity of the presence effect. As a result, it was shown that the participants who were involved in the work with the help of a PC experienced a decrease in indicators at the level of reliable statistical significance for the activation parameter. When working with VIVE helmets, reliable increases are shown in terms of activation, arousal, tone, well-being, asthenic state and euphoria. In general, we can talk about the intensive and positive impact of didactic VR programs broadcast with the help of higher level VR technologies on the mental states of students, which can become a source of formation of their stable and productive educational and cognitive motivation.