The article serves as an introduction to the issues discussed in tthe special issue. The current state of psycho-semantics as an interdisciplinary research approach to the exploration of consciousness and personality which allows to study various forms of the existence of meanings, a picture of the world, subjective meanings, im-plicit and explicit intentions, attitudes, representations is analyzed. The history of its development associated with implementing into scientific practices the semantic differential method constructed in the middle of the last century by the American psychologist C. Osgood and its modifications proposed by Russian researchers are examined. A variety of options for the implementation of research by modern Russian scholars within the framework of the psychosemantic approach are described.