Peculiarities of the psychological representation of the emergency situation by the railway staff

The paper discusses the important components of the effective work of the duty officer at the railway station, namely the high level of development of the professional qualities of the employee, trouble-free operation, operational work in contact with colleagues. The purpose of the study is to show the existence of significant differences in the formal and substantive features of the representation of an emergency among respondents with a different experience of participation in such situations. To assess professionally important qualities, an attempt was made to go beyond the scope of psychophysiological methods, and the features of psychological representation were also shown. The study was conducted in 2017-2018 in Moscow, in the centers of work organization of railway stations, based on a survey of 300 respondents. Three methods were used: associative characteristics of the representation of the emergency situation, self-assessment of the success of the results, a graphical representation of the psychological representation of the emergency situation. It was revealed that the causes of ineffective activities in emergencies are the operation of devices and the psychological climate in the organization. A number of features of the psychological representation of an emergency have been formed: formal features (sensory level) and substantial features (semantic level). The author concludes that, given the results of the analysis, it is possible to adjust the influence of psychological representation and make the employee’s actions more effective.