Publications

Purpose

The first year of college is a stressful life period connected with the experience of loneliness, isolation and depression since the majority of freshmen can no longer maintain an equally close relationship with school friends and family. Social networks have become a significant part of students' daily lives and might be an effective tool for maintaining relationship and reducing loneliness. There are contradictory results concerning the relationship between social networks sites (SNS) use and feelings of loneliness.

Design/methodology/approach

A four-week experiment was conducted to study the effect of SNS on feelings of social and emotional loneliness across freshmen. The treatment group (n = 40) took a break from SNS, while the control group (n = 37) used SNS as usual.

Findings

Comparison of the treatment and control groups showed that quitting SNS does not change either feeling of social/emotional loneliness. This paper also found that feelings of social and emotional loneliness did not depend on freshmen's positive/negative attitudes toward being alone.

Originality/value

This study is one of the few that uses experimental design to study the effects of using social networks on the psychological state of students in the context of higher education. The results showed that refusing SNS use can have a positive potential for psychological well-being of freshmen since solitude can be used by them as time for self-discovery and self-development. According to the results, social networks neither increase nor decrease the feeling of loneliness, and offline learning and communication environment plays a more significant role in the adaptation of freshmen. These results allow to take a new look at the studies related to the relationship between SNS use and loneliness and the role of social networks in the adaptation of freshmen.

Beginning with the historic racial desegregation in the United States, and spreading to other parts of the world, policy makers, guided by the findings of social scientists (e.g., Allport, 1954), have advocated for increased intergroup contact (e.g., in schools and neighborhoods) as the key to prejudice reduction and increased social cohesion. Recent work on the ‘irony of harmony’ effect ( Saguy, Tausch, Dovidio, & Pratto, 2009), however, suggests that intergroup contact can undermine disadvantaged group’s support for social change toward greater equality (e.g., Çakal, Hewstone, Schwär, & Heath, 2011; Dixon, Durrheim, & Tredoux, 2007). Using a large and heterogeneous dataset (N = 12,997 individuals from 69 countries), we demonstrate that intergroup contact and support for social change toward greater equality are positively associated among members of advantaged groups (ethnic majorities and cis-heterosexuals), but negatively associated among disadvantaged groups (ethnic minorities and sexual and gender minorities), supporting the ‘irony of harmony’ effect. Specification curve analysis revealed important variation in the size—and at times, direction—of correlations, depending on how contact and support for social change were measured. This allowed us to identify one type of support for change, willingness to work in solidarity for social change, that is positively associated with intergroup contact among both advantaged- and disadvantaged-group members.

‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ is an epic novel, considered one of the most significant works of Russian and world literature. The debate on the authorship of ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ had been surrounding the novel since its first release in 1928 by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. The supporters of the plagiarism theory often indicate that the real author of the novel is the Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov, who died before ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ was published. In the present study we applied the information-based similarity analysis (Yang et al., 2003a, Linguistic analysis of human heartbeats using frequency and rank order statistics. Physical Review Letters, 90: 108103; Yang et al., 2003b, Information categorization approach to literary authorship disputes. Physica A, 329, 473) and Burrows's Delta (Burrows, 2002, ‘Delta’: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3):267–87) to a corpus of Russian literature of XIX and XX centuries. We next used these two methods to compare ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ to Sholokhov’s and Kryukov’s writings. It was found that Fyodor Kryukov writings are distinct from ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’, whilst Sholokhov’s writings being close to the Don novel. The results also highlight how both information similarity analysis and Delta analysis can be used Russian language.

. This paper presents a novel rodent avoidance test. We have devel-oped a specialized device and procedures that expand the possibilities for exploration of the processes of learning and memory in a psychophysiological experiment. The device consists of a current stimulating electrode-platform and custom software that allows to control and record real-time experimental pro-tocols as well as reconstructs animal movement paths. The device can be used to carry out typical footshock-avoidance tests, such as passive, active, modified active and pedal-press avoidance tasks. It can also be utilized in the studies of prosocial behavior, including cooperation, competition, emotional contagion and empathy. This novel footshock-avoidance test procedure allows flexible current-stimulating settings. In our work, we have used slow-rising current. A test animal can choose between the current rise and time-out intervals as a signal for action in footshock avoidable tasks. This represents a choice between escape and avoid-ance. This method can be used to explore individual differences in decision-making and choice of avoidance strategies. It has been shown previously that a behavioral act, for example, pedal-pressing is ensured by motivation-dependent brain activity (avoidance or approach). We have created an experimental design based on tasks of instrumental learning: pedal-pressing in an operant box results in a reward, which is either a piece of food in a feeder (food-acquisition behavior) or an escape-platform (footshock-avoidance behavior). Data recording and analysis were performed using custom software, the open source Accord.NET Framework was used for real-time object detection and tracking.

There is ample evidence that morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human personality and behaviour. Previous studies have discovered associations between the features of artificial composite facial images and attributions of personality traits by human experts. We present new findings demonstrating the statistically significant prediction of a wider set of personality features (all the Big Five personality traits) for both men and women using real-life static facial images. Volunteer participants (N = 12,447) provided their face photographs (31,367 images) and completed a self-report measure of the Big Five traits. We trained a cascade of artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a large labelled dataset to predict self-reported Big Five scores. The highest correlations between observed and predicted personality scores were found for conscientiousness (0.360 for men and 0.335 for women) and the mean effect size was 0.243, exceeding the results obtained in prior studies using ‘selfies’. The findings strongly support the possibility of predicting multidimensional personality profiles from static facial images using ANNs trained on large labelled datasets. Future research could investigate the relative contribution of morphological features of the face and other characteristics of facial images to predicting personality.

Visual search tasks play a key role in theories of visual attention. But single-target search tasks may provide only a snapshot of attentional orienting. Foraging tasks with multiple targets of different types arguably provide a closer analogy to everyday attentional processing. Set-size effects have in the literature formed the basis for inferring how attention operates during visual search. We therefore measured the effects of absolute set-size (constant target-distractor ratio) and relative set-size (constant set-size but target-distractor ratio varies) on foraging patterns during “feature” foraging (targets differed from distractors on a single feature) and “conjunction” foraging (targets differed from distractors on a combination of two features). Patterns of runs of same target-type selection were similar regardless of whether absolute or relative set-size varied: long sequential runs during conjunction foraging but rapid switching between target types during feature foraging. But although foraging strategies differed between feature and conjunction foraging, surprisingly, intertarget times throughout foraging trials did not differ much between the conditions. Typical response time by set-size patterns for single-target visual search tasks were only observed for the last target during foraging. Furthermore, the foraging patterns within trials involved several distinct phases, that may serve as markers of particular attentional operations. Foraging tasks provide a remarkably intricate picture of attentional selection, far more detailed than traditional single-target visual search tasks, and well-known theories of visual attention have difficulty accounting for key aspects of the observed foraging patterns. Finally, we discuss how theoretical conceptions of attention could be modified to account for these effects.

Bishop Berkeley suggested that the distance of an object can be estimated if the object’s size is familiar to the observer. It has been suggested that humans can perceive the distance of the object by using such “familiarity” information, but most or many of the prior experiments that found an effect of familiarity were not designed to minimize or eliminate potential influences of: higher cognitive factors on the observers’ responses, or the influences of low-level image features in the visual stimuli used. We looked for the familiarity effect in two experiments conducted both in Russia and Japan. The visual stimuli used were images of three coins used in Russia and Japan. The participants’ depth perception was measured with a multiple-choice task testing the perceived depth-order of the coins. Our expectation was that any effect of “familiarity” on depth perception would only be observed with the coins of the participant’s country. We expected a substantial familiarity effect based on our meta-analysis of the “familiarity” effects observed in prior experiments. But, our results in both experiments showed that the familiarity effect was virtually zero. These findings suggest that the importance of a familiarity effect in depth perception should be reconsidered.

The legacy of Russian psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky is most closely associated with the cultural-historical paradigm and, in the West, has found its most extensive application in contemporary developmental and educational psychology. However, Vygotsky’s project was far more ambitious than this perspective implies—in fact, he conceived a new, original program of general psychology that could address human beings in their full measure, foregrounding the human potential for freedom and agency. The distinctive characteristic of Vygotsky’s approach was his profound interdisciplinarity and, specifically, his evolving dialogue with art practices and aesthetics, the scope of which has only become clear with the recent publication of previously unpublished archival material and his writings as an art and literary critic. This article has two aims: to outline a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of Vygotsky’s views on general psychology, on the basis of recent archival discoveries and publications, and attending to these materials closely, to explicate the role that Vygotsky allocated to art in his radical project of creating the “height psychology.”

Anne Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory (FIT) is a landmark in cognitive psychology and vision research. While many have discussed how Treisman’s theory has fared since it was first proposed, it is less common to approach FIT from the other side in time: to examine what experimental findings, theoretical concepts, and ideas inspired it. The theory did not enter into a theoretical vacuum. Treisman’s ideas were inspired by a large literature on a number of topics within visual psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and visual neurophysiology. Several key ideas developed contemporaneously within these fields that inspired FIT, and the theory involved an attempt at integrating them. Our aim here was to highlight the conceptual problems, experimental findings, and theoretical positions that Treisman was responding to with her theory and that the theory was intended to explain. We review a large number of findings from the decades preceding the proposal of feature integration theory showing how the theory integrated many ideas that developed in parallel within neurophysiology, visual psychophysics, and cognitive psychology. Our conclusion is that FIT made sense of many preceding findings, integrating them in an elegant way within a single theoretical account.

People’s attachment to the plant world makes a great contribution to the maintenance of psychological well-being. At the same time, little is known regarding the contribution of attitudes to plants to people’s morality; the current study is aimed at filling this gap. We assumed that the more positive the attitude to plants is, the higher the level of moral motives is. The survey was conducted on the Russian sample; 257 participants (students from Moscow universities, 199 female, Mage = 21.1, SDage = 2.5), were recruited. The following tools were used: a questionnaire People and Plants (PaP) consisting of five sub-scales (joy, esthetics, practice, closeness to nature, and ecology) and Moral Motives Model scale (MMM scale) including six sub-scales (self-restraint, not harming, social order, self-reliance (industriousness), helping/fairness, and social justice). It was found that all parameters of positive attitudes to plants, except practice, were strongly positively connected with moral motives. Multi-regression analysis allowed developing certain models demonstrating the contribution of attachment to the plant world to people's morality. The proscriptive motives (especially self-restraint) are more sensitive to attitudes to flora as compared to prescriptive motives; prescriptive motive self-reliance was not predicted by the attitude to flora at all. Moreover, the findings seem to be gender-sensitive (predictions are higher in females). The obtained results are discussed referring to the reverence for life ethics by Schweitzer, deep ecology by Næss, Biophilia hypothesis by Wilson, and psychology of moral expansiveness by Crimston et al.

People can store thousands of real-world objects in visual long-term memory with high precision. But are these objects stored as unitary, bound entities, as often assumed, or as bundles of separable features? We tested this in several experiments. In the first series of studies, participants were instructed to remember specific exemplars of real-world objects presented in a particular state (e.g., open/closed, full/empty, etc.), and then were asked to recognize either which exemplars they had seen (e.g., I saw this coffee mug), or which exemplar-state conjunctions they had seen (e.g., I saw this coffee mug and it was full). Participants had a large number of within-category confusions, for example misremembering which states went with which exemplars, while simultaneously showing strong memory for the features themselves (e.g., which states they had seen, which exemplars they had seen). In a second series of studies, we found further evidence of independence: participants were very good at remembering which exemplars they had seen independently of whether these items were presented in a new or old state, but the same did not occur for features known to be truly holistically represented. Thus, we find through 2 lines of evidence that the features of real-world objects that support exemplar discrimination and state discrimination are not bound, suggesting visual objects are not inherently unitary entities in memory.

Prevailing theories of visual working memory assume that each encoded item is stored or forgotten as a separate unit independent from other items. Here, we show that items are not independent, and that the recalled orientation of an individual item is strongly influenced by the summary statistical representation of all items (ensemble representation). We find that not only is memory for an individual orientation substantially biased towards the mean orientation, but the precision of memory for an individual item also closely tracks the precision with which people store the mean orientation (which is, in turn, correlated with the physical range of orientations). Thus, individual items are reported more precisely when items on a trial are more similar. Moreover, the narrower the range of orientations present on a trial, the more participants appear to rely on the mean orientation as representative of all individuals. This can be observed not only when the range is carefully controlled, but also shown even in randomly generated, unstructured displays, and after accounting for the possibility of location-based ‘swap’ errors. Our results suggest that the information about a set of items is represented hierarchically, and that ensemble information can be an important source of information to constrain uncertain information about individuals.

The study focuses on the relationship between intercultural friendships, social identities, and well-being of ethnic Russians in three different contexts of the North and South Caucasus. We revealed the positive relations of intercultural friendships with the host society identity in all contexts and with the well-being of Russians in the culturally diverse contexts. Ethnic identity is positively related to the self-esteem of Russians in two more inclusive contexts, and, negatively associated with their life satisfaction in the least inclusive context. The ethnic and host society identities mediated the relationship between intercultural friendships and psychological well-being only in the most inclusive context.

Few studies have examined to what extent commonly held stereotypes reflect real intergroup differences in motivational goals. Taking a values perspective (Schwartz et al., 2012), the study examines value preferences among Jews and Russians in Russia, to assess the extent to which commonly held stereotypes reflect values of group members. Results showed that Jews reported substantially higher levels of universalism‐tolerance, benevolence (both caring and dependability), and tradition values, and lower levels of power (both dominance and resources), and universalism‐nature values, than Russians. Results indicated that the widespread Jewish stereotypes of power, achievement, and rootlessness/cosmopolitanism are ungrounded, while the stereotypes of liberalism and particularism are upheld by the reported differences in the value preferences between Jews and the majority population in Russia. The present study underscores the importance of value comparisons between ethnic minority and majority groups for understanding their motivational goals and thus fighting prejudices and discrimination.

Inter-cultural families are an integral part of modern society, the institution of mutual influence of different cultures, of a person’s identity transformation. The studies of marital adjustment, values, and attitudes consistency in inter-cultural couples provide contradictory results. To resolve contradictions in this area, comparative studies of inter-cultural families of different types are important. The aim of the study is the comparative analysis of life and family values in inter-cultural couples, differing by the ethnic and religious affiliation of spouses. The participants: 69 couples: 20 mono-ethnic Russian, 30—inter-ethnic, inter-faith (Russians/Arabs); 19—inter-ethnic, with a common religion (Russian/Transcaucasian, Christians). The methods: Value Survey (Schwartz), Marital Role Expectations and Aspirations (Volkova), Marital Satisfaction Test (Stolin et al.), Mann–Whitney U-test, paired T-test. In inter-cultural couples, the spouses’ life-values coincidence is significantly less strong than in mono-cultural ones. However, in couples with common religious differences, their life values reflect not so much the contradictions, but the complementarity of traditional gender values. In general, the different cultures of spouses (both ethnic and religious) optimizes the process of comparing values and family attitudes. Despite a number of difficulties, spouses from inter-cultural couples generally have more consistent ideas about their family life. 

The Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) is a recently published 60-item questionnaire that measures personality traits within the five-factor model framework. An important aspect of the BFI-2 is that it measures the traits at both the domain and facet levels and also controls acquiescence bias via the balanced number of true- and false-keyed items across the domains and facets. The current research evaluates factorial measurement invariance of a Russian version of the BFI-2 across sex and age within samples of 1,024 university students (Study 1) and 1,029 Internet users (Study 2). Across these samples, men scored lower on the domains of negative emotionality and agreeableness and slightly higher on extraversion. Sex differences were also obtained on various facets. In the Internet sample, age correlated modestly with several Big Five domains in accordance with the well-documented maturity principle. The newly developed Russian version of BFI-2 showed good reliability and validity across both samples. Moreover, random intercept exploratory factor analyses showed that the BFI-2 displayed a hierarchical five-domain-15-facet structure that demonstrated strict measurement invariance across sex and age.

The article presents pilot data from a study conducted as part of a large project investigating the impact of socialization on child development supported by a Grant from the Government of the Russian Federation (№14.Z50.31.0027, PI: Grigorenko). The purpose of the study was to investigate indicators of psychological, social and emotional well-being in adults with experience of institutionalization in comparison with peers who grew up in biological families. We used scales from the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) and the World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire (WHOQOL-BREF). Results showed no significant differences between the group of orphanage graduates and the comparison group. However, using classification procedures we established that living conditions (separate apartment vs. a "public" space - a communal apartment or a dormitory) is an important variable predicting group belonging based on well-being indices. Thus, it appears that in adulthood, it is not the history of institutionalization but the actual living environment that is associated with indicators of the psychological, social and emotional well-being of orphanage graduates.

The concept of regression is considered with an emphasis on the differences between the positions of Freud and Jung regarding its significance. The paper discusses the results of experimental analyses of individual experience dynamics (from gene expression changes and impulse neuronal activity in animals to prosocial behaviour in healthy humans at different ages, and humans in chronic pain) in those situations where regression occurs: stress, disease, learning, highly emotional states and alcohol intoxication. Common mechanisms of regression in all these situations are proposed. The mechanisms of regression can be described as reversible dedifferentiation, which is understood as a relative increase of the representation of low-differentiated (older) systems in the actualized experience. In all of the cases of dedifferentiation mentioned above, the complexity of the systemic organization of behaviour significantly decreases.

Chromatic stimuli across a boundary of basic color categories (BCCs; eg blue and green) are discriminated faster than colorimetrically equidistant colors within a given category. Russian has two BCCs for blue, sinij 'dark blue' and goluboj 'light blue'. These language-specific BCCs were reported to enable native Russian speakers to discriminate cross-boundary dark and light blues faster than English speakers (Winawer et al., 2007, PNAS, 4, 7780-7785). We re-evaluated this finding in two experiments that employed identical tasks as in the cited study. In Experiment 1, Russian and English speakers categorized colors as sinij / goluboj or dark blue / light blue respectively; this was followed by a color discrimination task. In experiment 2 Russian speakers initially performed the discrimination task on sinij / goluboj and goluboj / zelënyj 'green' sets. They then categorized these colors in three frequency contexts with each stimulus presented: (i) an equal number of times (unbiased); more frequent (ii) either sinij or goluboj; (iii) either goluboj or zelënyj. We observed a boundary response speed advantage for goluboj / zelënyj but not for sinij / goluboj. The frequency bias affected only the sinij / goluboj boundary such that in a lighter context, the boundary shifted towards lighter shades, and vice versa. Contrary to previous research, our results show that in Russian, stimulus discrimination at the lightnessdefined blue BCC boundary is not reflected in processing speed. The sinij / goluboj boundary did have a sharper categorical transition than the dark blue / light blue boundary,

This research examines the relationship of social capital with the acculturation attitudes and sociocultural adaptation of 122 migrants from Central Asian republics of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan) and 136 migrants from South Korea. The questionnaire included scales for assessing acculturation attitudes (integration, assimilation, and separation), individual social capital (bridging and bonding), and sociocultural adaptation. Using parallel mediation analysis, we found that acculturation attitudes for migrants from Central Asia are secondary to their social capital in relation to sociocultural adaptation. However, among migrants from South Korea, social capital is not linked to their acculturation attitudes, and in general, its role in sociocultural adaptation is lower as compared to the role of acculturation attitudes. As a whole, our research shows that although sociocultural adaptation for all ethnic groups is linked to acculturation attitudes and social capital, acculturation attitudes for certain ethnic groups can be dependent on social capital.

Variability in beat-to-beat heart activity reflects the dynamics of heart-brain interactions. From the positions of the system evolutionary theory, any behaviour is based on simultaneous actualization of functional systems formed at different stages of phylo- and ontogenesis. Each functional system is comprised by neurons and other body cells, the activity of which contributes to achieving an adaptive outcome for the whole organism. In this study we hypothesized that the dynamics of spectral parameters of heart rate variability (HRV) can be used as an indicator of the system mismatch observed when functional systems with contradictory characteristics are actualized simultaneously. We presented 4–11-year-old children (N = 34) with a set of moral dilemmas describing situations where an in-group member achieved optional benefits by acting unfairly and endangering lives of out-group members. The results showed that LF/HF ratio of HRV was higher in children with developed moral attitudes for fairness toward out-groups as compared to children who showed preference for in-group members despite the unfair outcome for the outgroup. Thus, the system mismatch in situations with a moral conflict is shown to be reflected in the dynamics of heart activity.