The Problem of Personality in Social Psychology

The development of any science, including psychology, is determined today by two opposing but intimately interrelated tendencies: differentiation and integration.     

The Psychology of the Self-Actualizing Personality in the Work of Abraham Maslow

The second and third quarters of this century saw the appearance of a number of different concepts of personality in foreign psychology. Most of these were spawned by pathopsychology as a result of attempts to understand the personality of the neurotic and as a practical offshoot of psychotherapy. Although these theories were generalizations based on studies of the psychopathological personality, they began to be propagated by their creators as general theories of personality. Material gathered from the investigation of mental patients was used as the foundation for what are now standard personality tests — the Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) — used chiefly to discover neurotic tendencies in the individual. An extremely exaggerated evaluation of the significance of the pathopsychological method has been the hallmark of personality theory in foreign psychology. Yet the neurotic and, even more so, the pathological personality are qualitatively, not quantitatively, distinct from the personality of a normal human being. We must therefore concur with Maslow, who shows how the "study of mutilated, sickly, immature and unhealthy subjects will also give rise to a mutilated psychology and philosophy" (9, p. 234).     

The Problem of Development in Psychology

1. The problem of development in psychology hinges on the problem of the subject matter of psychology. This dependency is discernible in the old psychology and in its contemporary trends as well. Accordingly, the definition of the subject matter of psychology expressed by the formula "man as an active agent in the environment" will lead to a specific understanding of psychological development.     

Aerobiological Literature in Scientific Periodicals

Analysis of a sample of 1 411 aerobiological articles published in 370 periodicals showed that 25% of the articles were included in six periodicals, 50% in 22 and 75% in 90. Some statistics are given on the sample.     

On the Question of the Psychology of Scientific Creativity

In every scientific discovery, we can distinguish at least two aspects: first, the precise course of the discovery with all details and in all its individuality; second, its final result, abstracted from all circumstances and subjective considerations connected with the personal characteristics of the discoverer and the circumstances under which the discovery was made. In this "purified view" the substance of the discovery usually enters into science and establishes itself there in the quality of ascertained truth. Because of this, in the great majority of cases, the history of science does not present information about the specific path that a particular discovery followed; but even if it preserves this information, it is usually only in the form of anecdotes that have come down to us, or fragments about some one moment of the whole discovery, which possibly did not play a decisive role, but was preserved thanks to simple chance.     

The Paths of Development of Mathematical Psychology

This article reviews current developments in Soviet mathematical psychology and relates them to the very extensive extant literature in the United States. Programmatic articles of this kind are frequent in Soviet journals. They serve the dual purpose of highlighting current areas of concern and pointing to probable future areas of growth. Mathematics in large doses is now a standard part of the Soviet psychologist's education, and can be counted on to be an important feature of future psychological research.     

The Category of Age in the Psychology and Pedagogy of Development

Vygotsky's words, uttered about sixty years ago, may serve as a very special epigraph to the analysis that follows; they have not lost their meaning even today: "The problem of age is not only central to the whole of child psychology: it is the key to all questions of practice as well" [4. P. 260].

The key importance of the concept of age as a category in educational psychology has become obvious now, in light of the urgent need for a reorganization of education, a need to give it a developmental character. This category is just as important for a practice-oriented pedagogy, which can no longer be satisfied with simple study of individual phenomena in educational psychology; it must necessarily become a composite and, even more, a projective science, since it involves contriving complex, synthetic objects that bring together concrete studies, blueprints for educational systems, the programs and technology of continuous education throughout a person's entire life, and expert systems for evaluating and means for monitoring the effectiveness of such continuous education.     

The Problem of the Development of the Intellect and Learning in Human Psychology

The definition of word from which Shpet proceeds embraces every linguistic phenomenon, both autosemantic and synsemantic. The definition includes every isolated word ("dictionary material") as well as a coherent period or sentence and any organic member or arbitrarily established part of them: "Indeed, whatever specific part of a whole in human speech we isolate, it will contain, if only virtually, the properties, functions, and relations of the whole" (Shpet, 1989. P. 402).     

The Problem of Child Development In Soviet Psychology

The problem of child development was central in Soviet psychology from the start. Interest in child development arose, on the one hand, in connection with the needs of pedagogical practice, for the reconstruction and improvement of the educational system for the new generation, and, on the other hand, as a result of the theoretical importance of the problem in working out a genetic approach to the study of the human mind [psikhika].     

The Search for Significance: A Few Peculiarities in the Distribution of P Values in Experimental Psychology Literature

In this project I investigate the use and possible misuse of p values in papers published in five (high-ranked) journals in experimental psychology. I use a data set of over 135’000 p values from more than five thousand papers. I inspect (1) the way in which the p values are reported and (2) their distribution. The main findings are following: first, it appears that some authors choose the mode of reporting their results in an arbitrary way. Moreover, they often end up doing it in such a way that makes their findings seem more statistically significant than they really are (which is well known to improve the chances for publication). Specifically, they frequently report p values “just above” significance thresholds directly, whereas other values are reported by means of inequalities (e.g. “p<.1”), they round the p values down more eagerly than up and appear to choose between the significance thresholds and between one- and two-sided tests only after seeing the data. Further, about 9.2% of reported p values are inconsistent with their underlying statistics (e.g. F or t) and it appears that there are “too many” “just significant” values. One interpretation of this is that researchers tend to choose the model or include/discard observations to bring the p value to the right side of the threshold.