Philosophy, Anthropology, Culture

Vygotsky: Between Socio-Cultural Relativismand Historical Materialism. From a Psychologicalto a Pedagogical Perspective

In this paper I draw a distinction between two strands of argument that have evolved in the wake of Vygotsky’s early 20th century writing. I examine key methodological differences between sociocultural relativism and historical materialism. I then consider the pedagogical implications of these differences. My concern is that the all too common western predeliction for a post modern account yields a deeply conservative approach to pedagogy. In this form pedagogy may loose its power as a tool of social transformation and may curtail the possibilities for individual transformation. I close with a quote which neatly captures this concern: “Methodology is not a "toolbox" of different methods from which the researcher selects some on the basis of personal or social preferences! Instead, it is an integrated structure of the epistemological process (Branco & Valsiner, 1997) that can equally and easily reveal and obscure the empirical reality in the knowledge construction process of social scientists”.

Psychotherapy and Psychocorrection

Girls’ Emotional and Meaningful Attitude to Motherhood

We carried out the conditions analysis of the development of emotional and meaningful attitude to motherhood among student-age girls in connection with low fertility and ambiguous attitude of young people to parenting — a pressing problem in present-day Russia. The presented results of the empirical study (N=230) identify five types of girls ‘ attitude to motherhood and show their relationship with the peculiarities of parent-child interaction in the parent family. The unfavorable tendency of negative and ambivalent attitude to motherhood was revealed in a significant part of the sample. The formation of positive emotional and meaningful attitudes towards the birth of children in girls is facilitated by parental acceptance, cooperation, closeness, consent, as well as the authority of parents and satisfaction with relations with them. Disharmonious child-parent relationships are more often found in girls that reject a mother’s role. The role of a sibling position is considered, as well as a factor of girls’ living together with parents or separately.

Educational Psychology

Study-Related Experiences and Their Association with Psychological Well-Being

The paper presents an analysis of empirical data on relationship of study-related learning experiences with students’ psychological well-being and academic success.The data were obtained using the original Activity-Related Experiences Assessment technique (AREA) and a number of additional measures.The results of four studies are presented.The first one was devoted to the psychometric validation of AREA questionnaire.The results confirmed the construct validity of the model of activity-related experiences.The second study compared experiences associated with different types of activities (study and leisure).Differences in the structure of correlations of experiences related to different activities confirmed that experiences are activity-related rather than personality-related.The third study presents data on the relationship of study-related experiences with personality traits and academic performance.Only the experience of pleasure revealed a significant association with academic performance.The purpose of the last study was identifying the structure and reliability of AREA on the combined sample by CFA using and checking the connection of study-related experiences with indicators of psychological well-being.Experiences of pleasure and meaning were closely related to each other and negatively related to the experience of void, while the experience of effort was hardly associated the other three scores.Experiences of pleasure and meaning reveal predictable direct (and the experience of void the reverse) association with indicators of well-being.

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