Communication-dialogue and Time Aspect in Empathic Understanding

1
Communication-dialogue and Time Aspect in
Empathic Understanding

• Performed by Alla Konstantinovna Bolotova,
  Professor, Doctor of Psychology
• Department of Psychology,
• National Research University Higher School of
  Economics, Moscow, Russia

2
Introduction

• An important part of a person's psychological
  health is the presence in his/her life of
  extended and eventful time prospectives of the
  future. This problem was widely researched (S.
  Buhler, V.Frankl, U.Brohnfenbrenner).
• Time is one of important, but rarely used in
  development and self-realization of the social
  potential of a person's psychological structure.
  In periods of social hardships, a person
  experiences time in his life (past, present and
  future of his life) in a different way. Sometimes
  a feeling of time is lost (which is one of the
  signs indicating a life-crisis going on), level
  of self-evaluation goes down while psychological
  tension increases.

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Hypothesis

• Results of our research let us suppose that the
  time is a valuable factor in prevention and
  overcoming of psychological tension and
  instability when adequate reflection of time
  prospectives, transformation of life plans in the
  past and present turn into the basis for a
  person's development and building of new life
  aims and plans.

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Method

• Subjects
• 63 former white collars (23 men and 40 women)
  all in situation of a job loss.
• Procedure
• Rusalov's   temperamental characteristics test of
  a person's activity aimed at objective and social
  spheres was used. This test's scales indicate the
  types of a person's activity, communication and
  self-regulation. They show the main orientation
  in objective and social  spheres  and his/her
  activity type in communication with the
  environment. Peculiarities of life perception
  were studied with the help of projective methods
  and psychological autobiography (Bronfenbrenner).
  The methods are connected with situations of real
  events and allow to aim the respondents at the
  analysis and acceptance of the past, reveal the
  ability to build up prospective models of the
  future, projecting and evaluating realistically
  achievements and failures in the past and present
  experience.

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Results

• The received results let us divide the
  respondents into two groups ergic (30 persons
  - 16 men and 14 women), oriented at building up
  of the objective sphere of human life, easily
  changing activities and communicative (33
  persons - 6 men and 27 women) all respondents of
  this group demonstrated high sensitivity to
  failures in communication and need in social
  contacts.
• The comparative analysis of behavioral reactions
  of the two groups, of their subjective
  experiences connected with future and time
  prospectives showed that members of the ergic
  group mostly estimated their situation as
  hopeless and possibility to find a new job as
  very low. They demonstrated obvious narrowing of
  time prospective. Respondents of the
  communicative group for the most part showed
  readiness to change their life and profession,
  and wide time prospective.

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Discussions

• Evaluation of the past experience, its
  eventfulness for the further self-development of
  a person acquires much importance in the
  situation of hardships. The research showed that
  the respondents living through difficult
  situations underestimate eventfulness of their
  lives, fail to lean on their past experience and
  consequently have very negative image of their
  life prospectives.
• Low self-evaluation is characteristic for both
  groups, but members of the communicative group
  demonstrated much higher self-evaluation with
  regard to the future. It should be noted that
  female respondents attributed more attention to
  the future than male respondents did, who were
  mostly negative in the assessment of their
  prospectives for the future.

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Conclusions

• It is important to understand that life crisis,
  sudden changes of a person's life and unstable
  situations change not only the usual social
  sphere of a person, make his/her potential low
  but damage spatial and temporal parameters of a
  person's life causing narrowing of temporal
  prospectives of a person's activities in general.
• Narrowing of temporal prospectives,
  underestimation of the future, low productivity
  of eventfulness reflection in the past and
  present experience render the process of
  self-realization and creation of prospective aims
  for the future activities more difficult.

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References

• Bolotova A.K. Self-revelation and Temporal
  Limits. Psychological aspects of social
  instability. Mow. 1995 59-73
• Bolotova A.K. Person and Time in Situation of
  Social Instability. Social Science and
  Contemoraneity. 1997 (6). 38