Features of Mental Stability of Security Department Staff with Different Duration of Service in the Penal System of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Introduction: the article considers one of the urgent issues of legal psychology – the disclosure of the mechanisms of psychological stability in employees of security department of correctional institutions. Since the professional activity of security department employees has a sociogenic and stressful nature due to a number of parameters, the predominance of the impact of stress factors over the mechanisms of mental stability in many cases leads to negative implications such as the development of psychological burnout, social maladjustment and personality deformation. Aim: to determine internal mechanisms that reduce adaptive capabilities and factors that promote them, to study the features of psychological resistance to the action of social and stress factors in the security department employees, depending on the length of their service. Methods: we study the mechanisms of psychological stability of employees and the parameters of models of stress states with the use of the following methods: “Neuropsychic stability” (“Forecast”) technique developed by V.Yu. Rybnikov (1990), a method for assessing professional burnout developed by C. Maslach and S. Jackson (1986), innovative multi-factor methods for assessing basic professional typologies of stress and spirituality of an individual according to K.B. Malyshev (2021). Conclusions: the results of the study show that social stress among security personnel is one of the most traumatic forms of stress and it corresponds to the concept of professional stress. Moreover, the essence of the concept of psychological stability is associated with the study of subjective features of the phenomenon of disequilibrium of life activity – stress. Stress reflects the entire range of basic conditions – health and development, maladjustment and pathology. The data obtained in the study indicate the disharmonic nature of psychological adaptability (pseudo-adaptation) to the action of social stressors in employees with ten years of service experience. At the same time, the majority of respondents, in contrast to employees with a period in service of up to five years, have basic professional types of stress and spirituality, which indicates a low level of their socio-moral value orientations. This makes it necessary to develop innovative approaches to the prevention of professional stress and burnout among employees at all stages of their professional activity on the basis of the subject-subject paradigm in the development of the intention to form spiritual and moral values in an individual.