The Organization of Mental Representations of Pandemic Among Workers of the Socionomic Occupations

Abstract

The study defines and analyses the organization of the concept of Pandemic. According to psychological interpretation the concept of Pandemic is a mental model that reflects objectified and subjective-evaluative highlighters and influences the coping behaviour in a specific difficult situation. The diagnostic complex included three open-type tasks (a directed associative experiment, problem formulation, and a visual portrait of the concept). The assumption about the specifics of mental representations of the pandemic in medical workers and sales assistants was tested. The results demonstrated that sales assistants had a generalized mental model of the pandemic (a disease around the world) and described different problems in studying the pandemic. Medical specialists working with COVID-19 patients had more differentiated mental representations of the pandemic; they were better aware of the medical and health problems of the pandemic. Mental representations of pandemic among participants included objectified and negative emotional-evaluative descriptions.