The relationship of evaluative perceptions about behavior in socially significant situations and the expressiveness of psychological defense mechanisms in adolescents

Statement of the problem. Adolescence is a period of intense personal and social development, the formation of intrapsychic foundations of attitude towards social reality and normative regulation of behavior. Among the psychological mechanisms involved in ensuring the adaptive processes of including an individual in social interaction, psychological defense mechanisms occupy a significant place. Researchers consider their significance in the dialectic of a priori necessity, or the pathological manifestation in the processes of realizing the needs of an individual as limiting filters for the perception of information about reality. At the same time, what role these restrictions play in structuring ideas about the laws of social interaction remains a poorly studied question. This determined the purpose of the study - to identify the nature of the connection between evaluative ideas about normativity/deviance and the severity of psychological defense mechanisms in adolescents. Methodology (materials and methods). The methodological basis of the study was a systematic approach, which involves considering psychological defense as one of the intrapsychic mechanisms that provide an integral system of social adaptation of the developing personality. The study used: 1) the author’s questionnaire, which proposes to evaluate 25 significant characteristics of behavior in terms of determining negative and positive deviance in the variants of one’s own opinion and the represented opinion of friends, the majority of peers, parents, and the majority of adults; 2) developed by R. Plutchik, G. Kellerman and H.R. Conte, the “Life style index” questionnaire, diagnosing the severity of psychological defenses. The respondents are students of secondary schools in Krasnoyarsk and the Krasnoyarsk Territory aged 14-16 years (N = 116). Data processing method is correlation analysis. Research results. It was revealed that the connection between evaluative ideas and the severity of psychological defenses has a structure with a density that is different for different types of defenses, different categories of assessed behavioral characteristics and the opinions of different subjects represented by adolescents. Complex types of psychological defenses have a more intense relationship with evaluative ideas. Adolescents’ assessments of adults have the least dependence on the severity of psychological defenses, the greatest dependence on their own assessments of the normativity/deviance of various characteristics of behavior, and among the evaluative categories, behavioral characteristics related to manifestations of social success and personal weakness are more loaded with connections linked to the severity of defenses. Conclusion. The general trend in the totality of the analyzed relationships is the connection with the severity of psychological defenses of prosocial evaluative ideas aimed at condemning negative deviance and restraining freedom of self-expression. The results of the study clarify the significance of psychological defenses in the processes of social adaptation of a developing personality.