A postgraduate student of the Faculty of Psychology Svetlana Korobova was awarded a prize at the Prospects of Science 2016 contest. Svetlana came up with a mathematical model allowing to predict stress response in case of information exposure, based on personality traits data.
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The study was performed under academic advising by the Head of the Laboratory for Psychology and Psychophysiology of Stress Resistance and Creativity at the School of Medical Biology, Professor of the Department of Developmental Psychology and Age Related Counseling at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Doctor of Sciences (Psychology), Professor Vera Gryazeva-Dobshinskaya.
Every day we come across many potentially stressful situations. In this age of information society the situations when humans interact with information are of special significance. Intensity and content of the information flow are powerful stress-factors. In this context a human being striving for successful self-realization must know whether or not s/he is resistant to information exposure, and in case of susceptibility to stress, must be able to prevent development of negative consequences, know his/her strengths and weaknesses, and learn how to cope with stress.
Different methods of immersion into potentially stressful situations were used in the research: first, a typical professional activity situation was simulated which required dealing with large amounts of information; second, a situation of information exposure with potentially stressful content was simulated.Stress response was diagnosed through objective scoring of the changes in the level of brain activation by means of “Activationmeter 9К” device.
The research diagnostics covered a wide range of personal traits: from psychophysiological to psychological and socio-cultural ones. The necessity to use a number of diagnostics parameters is caused by the fact that stimulus stressfulness is defined by many factors: resources of the nervous system,temperament, personality traits – goals, values, and life strategy.
The elaborated model of stress susceptibility has a prognostic value and allows to the accuracy of 94.4% to predict a stress reaction based on data of diagnostics of a person’s individual characteristics.
The research results allowed to reduce the number of diagnostics parameters required for determining stress susceptibility. The parameters most significant for assessing the susceptibility to information stress were determined, including the parameters of brain activity, of information processing style, of temperament, and of strategic choice of life trajectory.
Thus, the model of stress susceptibility allows to predict a person’s stress response based on diagnostics of the parameters most significant for determining susceptibility to information stress, as well as to find the resources which might be helpful in boosting resistance to stress.
The research results were presented at the Fifth International Luria Memorial Congress Lurian Approach in International Science, where the leading specialists in psychology and neurosciences from 20 countries of the world took part.
The Congress was held on October 13-16 at Ural Federal University in the city of Yekaterinburg, with contributions from the Russian Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, L.S.Vygotsky Institute (Portugal), Kemerovo Federal University, and Tomsk State University. Also the participants included: International Society of Applied Neuropsychology, International Society of Cultural-Historical Activity Research, Center for Integration of Neuropsychology and Psychology, and A.R. Luria Research-and-Development Center for Child Neuropsychology.
The paper theses co-authored by Vera Gryazeva-Dobshinskaya and Yulia Dmitrieva are published in the Congress’s collected papers included into Russian Science Citation Index, and an article is also filed to Psychology in Russia: State of Art journal indexed in Scopus.