Estimating the coherence of mental representations of category “emotion” in non-psychologist and psychologist students

Abstract

Psychologists studying emotion repeatedly noted that the meaning of the concept of «emotion» in both everyday and scientific area is characterized by insufficient coherence and fuzzy boundaries. This raises the question of whether the representations of people in everyday life include a related set of properties that characterize emotions as a class of phenomena, and whether these representations differ in non-psychologist and psychologist students. Our goal was to study the coherence of mental representations of emotions as a class of phenomena among psychologist and non-psychologist students. Participants included non-psychologist (100 male, 110 female, mean age – 19 years) and psychologist students (31 male, 159 female, mean age – 20 years). Methods used included the method of definitions, the method of associations; the coherence of the answers was estimated with frequency analysis, the method of family resemblance by E. Roche, the Pearson association coefficient, the method for calculating the indices of coherence, divergence and structure organization proposed by A.V. Karpov. The results of the study showed that non-psychologist students' answers were characterized the lower level of categorical validity, structure coherence, overall organization, established less amount of correlations then psychologist students' answers. It can be concluded that mental representations of non-psychologist students demonstrate lower coherence than psychologist students. The observed differences may be due to the fact that psychologist students learn scientific concepts of emotion as part of their education. At the same time, the answers that psychologist students give cannot be called completely coherent, which may be due to the difficulty of identifying a related set of properties that consist the meaning of the scientific concept of emotion. In conclusion are given some recommendations for the teacher aimed at increasing the level of coherence in mental representations of emotions among students.