Emotional component of university students’ professional consciousness in the present-day media discourse space

Abstract

The emotional component of the university students’ professional consciousness is a reflection of the subjects’ attitude towards their academic and professional activity, to themselves as future specialists, or to individual professionally significant aspects of their personality and activity. Affective (emotional) structures play a crucial role in the individual’s consciousness as they correlate with cognitive mechanisms of human consciousness and build “a unified system or unity of affect and intellect”. Affective components of consciousness consist of emotions, moods, feelings and possess a number of functions that define success and efficiency of the individual’s activity: evaluation and prompting functions, regulating and synthesizing functions, expressive, activation and signal functions. It is essential to mention that successfully managing the affective component of university students’ consciousness may define their attitude towards the whole academic process, their future career and life itself. Contemporary media discourse environment that people are living in today, no doubt, makes an impact on young people’s affects, emotions and values. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to identify and evaluate how far the present-day media world influences the emotional component of students’ consciousness, whether this impact changes young people’s attitude towards their education and career goals and which affects and emotions students experience when referring to the space of media discourse in search of knowledge related to professional issues.The experiment, conducted by the authors of this paper, has covered university students of three higher education institutions – Moscow State Pedagogical University, RUDN University and South Ural State Humanitarian Pedagogical University in two regions of Russian Federation (Moscow and Chelyabinsk regions) which also helped to see the similarities and differences in the young people’s affective perception of their academic and professional achievements through the prism of the new media discourse environment. Recommendations on how to handle the emotional and value components of students’ consciousness (while teaching them at the university) were suggested in the conclusion of the research.