Mental World Research Articles

The Expression of the Spirituality of the Human and Animal in the Novels by Chingiz Aitmatov on the basis of Amebey Composition

Topicality and necessity of the topic. In the world literature, the chronotope is interpreted as a compositional element that reflects the sequence and intensity of events, describes the images and affects the author’s vision on the structure, view, perception of the world. In the next hundred years of development of the world scientific-theoretical thinking, the chronotope is accepted as one of the poetic means of depiction of existence and a literary phenomenon based on the writer’s creative intent and ideological concept of the work. The article provides a scientific and theoretical analysis of the properties of the microworld on the example of the novels “The Day of the Age”, “The Place of the Skull”, “The Time of the Falling Mountains”. In the subsequent development of scientific and theoretical thinking in the world, the chronotope is considered one of the poetic means of demonstrating reality, as well as a literary process, which is basic for expressing reality in compositional construction and illustrating the plot, relying on the writer's intention and the ideological concept of a literary work. The microcosm reflects changes in the mental world of the protagonist, while the macrocosm reflects the conflict arising from the relationship between man and society. The aim of the research work. The purpose of the study is to generalize the scientific-analytical and theoretical examples of parallel chronotope forms on the examples of Chingiz Aitmatov’s novels. Methods of the research. Methods of comparative-typological, biographic, psychological analysis have been used. Results and considerations. The chronotope provides an opportunity to comprehensively perceive the landscape of the literary world created by the author as the object and subject of the work. The microcosm reflects the changes in the spiritual world of the protagonist, the conflict that arises between the relationship between human being and his/her “I”. One of the tasks of modern literature is to analyze the vital facts of artistic epic in modern novels, events in the context of individuality and comparative-typological generalization on the examples of the works by the writers who lived in one place and one time, one place, different time, different places. Conclusion. In the conclusion and comments section, the theoretical features of the chronotope, the parallel expression of the microchronotope were studied on the basis of the laws of the novel genre.

Fear, Hatred and Strategy during the Wars of the Roses

AbstractThis article examines the importance of emotions such as fear, enmity and hatred during the Wars of the Roses. Despite the large body of scholarship on the wars and extensive corpus of primary sources, historians have not looked at the Wars of the Roses from this perspective. This lacuna is unfortunate for two reasons. First, examining the role of emotions provides an additional insight into the wars that current discussions have viewed as tangential. Second, the Wars of the Roses provide a different way of viewing emotions in medieval warfare from studies of emotions in other wars. Discussions of emotions in medieval warfare tend to examine the experiences and mental worlds of individual combatants, the performative value of emotions in political conflict or the use of emotions in the memory of wars. In contrast, this article demonstrates that, during the Wars of the Roses, emotions had a real and tangible influence on the course and outcome of the wars, also influencing military strategy. This article highlights the potential of the late medieval English sources for revealing the use of emotions in war. It then examines three ways in which emotions shaped the wars: the personal enmities between successive dukes of Somerset and members of the House of York; regional hatreds between northerners and southerners; and finally collective hatred and blame directed towards individual councillors. Taken together, the material examined here provides new insights into the tangible effects that emotions had on the strategies of commanders and the politics a late medieval conflict.

Locke’s Knowledge of Ideas: Propositional or By Acquaintance?

Locke seems to have conflicting commitments: we know individual ideas and all knowledge is propositional. This paper shows the conflict to be only apparent. Looking at Locke’s philosophy of language in relation to the Port Royal logic, I argue, first, that Locke allows that we have non-ideational mental content that is signified only at the linguistic level. Second, I argue that this non-ideational content plays a role in what we know when we know an idea. As a result, we can see our knowledge of an idea as a form of knowledge by acquaintance: there is a direct epistemic relation between a mental object (an individual idea) and a knowing subject. But owing to Locke’s logic, that knowledge has a tacit propositional structure expressing the truth of the idea, which gains full signification only linguistically.

Using Tangram as a Manipulative Tool for Transition between 2D and 3D Perception in Geometry

Creating a mental image of our spatial environment is a key process for further abstract geometric thinking. Building a mental representation can be understood as a part of the process of visualisation. From the wide concept of visualisation, in this article, we will focus on the part where the mental representation of spatial relations, mental objects and mental constructions are created, and their manifestations as a 3D physical object and its plane representations arise. Our main goal is to follow the transition between 2D and 3D representations of physical objects and also to observe how and when such a transition happens in students’ thinking. For that purpose, we also use Tangram, because manipulation with the Tangram pieces in space and filling out planar figures by them indicates the transition between 3D and 2D. Our research, using an action research methodology, was conducted on the students of three 5th grade primary school classes as a part of a larger long-term project. We pointed out a relationship between spatial abilities and the perception of 2D–3D relationships in students’ mind.

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865

Effective methods of teaching for learners of English

This article is dedicated to help readers to make teaching more effective,by attending to learning and the inner mental world of the learner, and by then under standing how classroom activities and teacher decisions can create or limit,children’s opportunities for learning. It is about how to teach students and learners with the help of some helpful methods and exercises, by mentioning many intricacies, obscure rules, and exceptions.From an instructional view point,creating a meaningful context for language use it another advantage that games present.By using games,teachers can create contexts with enable unconscious learning because learners’ attention is on the message,not on the language.Therefore,when they completely focus on a game as an activity,children acquire language in the same way that they acquire their mother tongue,that is,without being aware of it.

Eesti- ja Liivimaa libahundipärimus rahvapärase ontoloogia muutumise peegeldajana

The article gives a short overview of the Estonian werewolf tradition in the 16th and 17th centuries and a glimpse into the 19th–20th-century werewolf beliefs. The image of werewolf of the earlier and later periods is compared. The differences between the images of these two periods are explained with the help of the approaches of Tim Ingold and Philipp Descola, which ground the changes in the worldview taking place together with the shift from the pre-modern society into modernity. The mental world of the 16th–17th-century Estonian and Livonian peasant did not encompass the category of nature, and the borders between the human being and the animal on the one side and organism and environment on the other side were not so rigid as they are in today’s people’s comprehension of the world. The ability to change into a wolf was seen as an added possibility of acquiring new experiences and benefits. As the popular ontology had changed by the second half of the 19th century – the human mind was raised into the ultimate position and the animal was comprehended as being inferior – the transformation of a man into an animal, if it was seriously taken at all, seemed to be strange and unnatural.

Theory of mind of adolescents in the context of inclusive education

Topicality of the study is due to the need for practice in understanding and substantiating the psychological foundations of the formation of such a personality trait of adolescents as tolerance, as well as in identifying other personal characteristics of adolescents as predictors of the formation of tolerance. The purpose of the article is a generalised theoretical presentation of the empirical results of a pilot study of the personality traits of adolescents in the context of inclusive education. Achieving this goal makes it possible to reveal the psychological mechanisms of the adolescent's social behaviour. The study of the problem of the mental model as a predictor of the formation of tolerance in adolescents in the context of inclusive education was carried out within the framework of the methodological principles developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, as well as in the framework of the system-subject approach of Yelena Sergiyenko, in which the traditions of the systemic (Boris Lomov, Alexei Leontiev, Vladimir Shadrikov) and the subject-activity (Sergei Rubinstein, Kseniya Abul'khanova, Andrey Brushlinskiy, Viktor Znakov) approaches in psychology are creatively integrated. The article presents and substantiates the results of an empirical study of the mental model as a predictor of the formation of tolerance in adolescents in the context of inclusive education. In the course of applying the procedure of regression analysis, on the basis of the mental model, the basic personality predictors of the formation of tolerance in adolescents – “self-control in communication”, “self-attitude” and “situational anxiety” were identified. The resulting regression model explains the possibility of influencing the general index of tolerance through the indicated personal characteristics. The mental model makes it possible to conceptualise the inner world of a teenager. The article substantiates new research opportunities for studying the ability of adolescents to understand their own mental world and the mental world of another. The conclusion is made about the high productivity of using the mental model, its research capabilities in the study of individual personality traits, and, in particular, in the formation of adolescent tolerance in the context of inclusive education.

A Discourse Analysis of Zuckerberg’s Pragmatic Identities’ Construction based on Adaptation Theory

People construct different pragmatic identities in everyday talk and the process of building identities usually adapts to the context. To be specific, entrepreneurs represents himself and the company when uttering to the outside society and the construction of entrepreneur’s identity is related to the company’s image. They are inclined to use intertextuality resources to build connection with the potential audience. Therefore, in this research, the author analyzed an entrepreneur’s speech discourse to describe what pragmatic identities are constructed and how does the construction adapt to the speaking context. To answer these questions, the author conducted a discourse analysis to illustrate relationship between the language use and physical, social and mental world based on Adaptation Theory. The results presented that the entrepreneur builds various master identities, interpersonal identities, and personal identities with intertextuality language resources to adjust to the speaking context. This study suggested that entrepreneurs are supposed to improve the skill of manipulating their discourse strategies to build close connection with potential listener.

Digital Science Art as an Ontological Metaphor

The article considers the possibility of using digital scientific art as a tool for philosophical and aesthetic cognition. On the example of games of cellular automata and from the point of view of the paradigm of synergetics, a large-scale analogy of the dynamics of multi-element distributed systems of various natures is revealed. The question is raised about the nature of beauty, which is interpreted as a fundamental cosmic phenomenon. The concept of protoconstruct is viewed as a mental (mathematical, digital) object, the properties of which are transferred to the objects and phenomena under study. As an example of digital protoconstructs, the article discusses the so-called cellular symmetroids. Cellular symmetroids can be considered from the point of view of scientific art as art objects. At the same time, they represent a deep ontological metaphor. A unique property of cellular symmetroids is spontaneous destruction and transition to quasi-chaotic dynamics. This feature can be linked to the idea of historical time, which is very unusual for mathematical objects. Mathematical structures that arise as a result of calculations according to this model are completely unique and inimitable, like the internal states of the soul or psyche of a thinking subject. At the same time, they are to the same extent determined (even involuntary) by the previous state. Integrity, internal unity are inherent not only in symmetric structures but also in the chaos that is born after them, which, in contrast to stereotypical statistical intuitive ideas, is deterministic. However, such an abstract digital art, based on the unconventional mathematics of dynamic chaos, is an accurate ontological metaphor, a visualization of the eidos of the beauty in their relationship with the cosmic logos and the nature of the original creative chaos.

A Narrative of Escape: Self Liberation by Sea and the Mental Worlds of the Enslaved

ABSTRACT This article investigates a singular case of maritime marronage from Jamaica to Cuba in the 1760s to explore the possibilities that archives present to reconstruct the mental worlds of enslaved Africans and the multilingual, transimperial Caribbean underground created by their voyages of escape. Reading Spanish/Cuban and British/Jamaican archives together, the article contextualizes the testimony of a Kongolese man who escaped one of the plantations where Tacky’s Revolt broke out in Jamaica and made his way to Trinidad, Cuba, by sea. There he claimed freedom as an indentured servant whose term of service was up, using a West African mnemonic device as evidence to do so before a Spanish colonial tribunal. As this man’s testimony illustrates, maritime marronage constituted just one part of an escapee’s ongoing struggle not only for freedom but also autonomy and refuge.

Visitor Books and Memory – Evaluating the Bautzner Straße Dresden Memorial Site's Significance for Former Stasi Prisoners’ Individual Memories

Abstract Memorial sites document aspects of history. Thus, they represent a historical past deemed relevant by the initiators in the public sphere. The former Stasi detention center and district administration in Dresden Bautzner Straße is a memorial site that is dedicated to a critical representation of the communist dictatorship in East Germany. This does, however, not tell much about the historical site's meaning to the visitors. In order to get an impression of the visitors’ spontaneous reactions and thoughts, I systematically examine and categorize the memorial site's visitor books. Through these books, memorial sites offer visitors the opportunity to write down their thoughts thereby enabling an open channel of communication. My focus is on entries by persons who explicitly identify as former inmates of the very detention center they visited. They make up roughly 10 percent of all entries. I examine which thoughts former Stasi prisoners wrote down having visited their place of ordeal. What feelings and thoughts emerge after the visit? My aim is to shed light on the memorial site's significance and importance for the prisoner's individual memory by analyzing the entries’ type and content. The visitor books offer an authentic and intriguing access to former political prisoners’ mental world and their individual memory. This contribution connects the media representation of the communist dictatorship and its meaning for the former prisoners’ individual memory.

From The Founding Editors: Thinking Preternaturally After Ten Years

From The Founding Editors: Thinking Preternaturally After Ten Years

The Emancipation from the Past: Bakhtin’s Carnival in the Mirror of Soviet Experience

In this article an attempt is made to place Bakhtin’s case in the context of the Soviet 1960s with their specific mental world. The study question is why this almost forgotten figure of the 1920s has become a proper man in a proper place in time of transition from Stalin’s Great Fear to Khrushchov’s liberalization with its continuation till 1968 and how this resurrection from the dead occured. The virtues and scientific significance of Bakhtin’s works are doubtless and undeniable. But there is something else that helps to explain Bakhtin’s phenomenon and its popularity. His readers mentality determines the fate of books and the spreading of ideas. The sixties witnessed the unprecedented success of Bakhtin’s books. They changed the vocabulary of humanities and the mode of thinking in the generation of so-called Thaw. Bakhtin became one of the most influential figures of the sixties and greatly stimulated the emergence of the new trend known as culturology. Bakhtin’s Rabelais was a special success. This text can be read on different levels and interpreted in many ways. Its content combines such genres as literary criticism, the history of culture, and philosophy. The readers of the sixties paid special attention to Bakhtin’s vision of popular culture with its central image of carnival and were especially sensitive and receptive for the concept of Laughing Renaissance as a spiritual twin of Thaw which had Marxist roots, not Bakhtin’s. Thanks to the complexity of the text’s possible interpretation, Bakhtin was mistakenly considered as an ideologist of Thaw, and his Rabelais – as an intellectual product of this historical moment full of optimism, great expectations and hopes. Bakhtin was read by the generation of the 1960s in accordance with its mentality, its pursuit of a new form of “Socialism with human face” when left and even Marxist ideas dominated in the non-conformist discourse. But all of that had little in common with authentic Bakhtin who could share neither this philosophical worldview nor the illusions of the 1960s. The view of laughter as a kind of social therapy and as a means of emancipation in society was far from Bakhtin’s. He fully realized the demonic nature of carnival and saw it as his ambivalent ally from hell hostile to every kind of ideocracy. His readers who had invented Renaissance as a prototype of their time and the first Thaw in history misunderstood the inner intentions of Bakhtin himself. But doing this quite unconsciously, they gave the first and triumphant life for the outstanding scientific and philosophical text on Rabelais written by the person of a damaged life from the past.

Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF APPLICATION OF PSYCHODIAGNOSTIC METHODS IN THE STUDY OF PERSONAL PROTECTIVE MECHANISMS

The article describes the protective mechanisms of the person. A reference is made to the inverse relationship between personal growth and defense mecha- nisms. The topicality of the article is closely connected with its essence and aim, e.i. in psychological consultation, especially in the process of studying the protec- tive mechanisms of the person, the characteristic features of psychodiagnostic me- thods should be strictly taken into consideration, aspiring to the accurate methods of psychological estimation in practical therapy to be considered as a rule, rather than an exception to the rules. It is important to receive initial or accurate infor- mation about the visitor’s personal traits and characteristics by means of psycho- diagnostic testing. The model "Big Five", developed by P. Costa and R. McCray, is presented, which nowadays describes personality traits of people most objectively. It is combined with three-factor model ''Dark Triad' that exposes the dark sides of the person. The need for originality and constant improvement of the source ma- terial is also noted. A reference is made to the main characteristics of the psy- chologist or of the highly skilled person, on the basis of which the specialist is authorized to assemble the mosaic of the mental world of the person in front of him and give a positive result.

The Processing of Visual Signals in Major Depressive Disorder.

The balanced processing of the internal mental world and the external world is a crucial aspect of everyday well-being. An extensive control of the internal emotional and cognitive world that often results in an internal expression of distress is a common feature of internalizing disorders. However, how depression affects the processing of the external world is still an open question. We, therefore, tested the processing of visual signals in major depressive disorder (MDD). To this end, we recorded the electroencephalogram of 38 MDD patients and 38 controls, while they performed a response-choice task with informative feedback and a passive viewing task. MDD patients differed significantly from controls in the early information processing of visual stimuli. The vertex positive potential (VPP) evoked by feedback in the response-choice task and pictures in the passive viewing task were smaller in MDD patients than in controls. This outcome suggests that depression might subtract attentional resources from external signal processing, with potential consequences in various cognitive domains.

Специфика взаимосвязи перцептов, репрезентаций, фреймов и концептов в ментальной модели мира

The paper aims to reveal specificity of interaction of percepts, representations, frames and concepts in human consciousness. The article provides an analytical survey of foreign and domestic studies on mechanisms of human cognition (knowledge storage and knowledge representation). Scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that the author for the first time analyses the frame “threat” using the strategic questioning method. The research findings are as follows: the author shows that the mental world model is a dynamic one; it focuses on concepts and is based on the antinomies “construction vs reconstruction”, “perception vs representation”.

The role of a single lingua franca in scientific inquiry

This paper discusses the role of English as the current lingua franca academica in contrast to a multilingual approach to scientific inquiry on the basis of four perspectives: a cognitive, a typological, a contrastive and a domain-specific one. It is argued that a distinction must be drawn between the natural sciences and the humanities in order to properly assess the potential of either linguistic solution to the problem of scientific communication. To the extent that the results of scientific research are expressed in formal languages and international standardised terminology, the exclusive use of one lingua franca is unproblematic, especially if phenomena of our external world are under consideration. In the humanities, by contrast, especially in the analysis of our non-visible, mental world, a single lingua franca cannot be regarded as a neutral instrument, but may more often than not become a conceptual prison. For the humanities the analysis of the conceptual system of a language provides the most reliable access to its culture. For international exchange of results, however, the humanities too have to rely on a suitable lingua franca as language of description as opposed to the language under description.

The concept of definiteness and its lexical-grammatical representation in the modern English-language scientific discourse

The subject of this research is the concept of definiteness and its lexical-grammatical representation in the scientific discourse of the modern English language. The author notes the universal nature of this concept, since it is a crucial component of communication in any culture, any human society. It was always important for the one who talks and the one who listens to indicate the objects of physical and mental world associated with the world of their things and notions. It is underlined that the development of society and transition from the communal to egocentric perception of the world changed the understanding of the concept of “definiteness”. The novelty of this this research consists in a specific articulation of the scientific problem. The concept of definiteness is viewed within the English scientific discourse, taking into account the crucial facts of lexical-grammatical implementation of this concept in other cognate languages. It is concluded that the changes in the concept of “definiteness” substantiated the peculiarities of the use of positive articles in the modern English-language scientific discourse, and also contributed to the widespread use of the zero article. The methodological framework is comprised of the methods of linguistic research: comparative-historical and comparative analysis; as well as methods of lexical-semantic and syntactic analysis of texts from the English-language scientific discourse.