The correlation between individual psychological characteristics and a person's representation of a difficult situation

The article is aimed at identifying a correlation between individual psychological characteristics and a person's representation of a difficult situation. It presents the results of a sociological study involved 300 people working in one of the Moscow railway centers. In the course of the study, the following methods are applied: an associative experiment, a graphic representation of a difficult situation, “Subjective Assessment of a Difficult Situation”, “The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire”, “Hardiness Survey”, “Multiple Stimulus Types Ambiguity Tolerance Scale-I”, “Action Control Scale”. A number of features of representation of a difficult situation are highlighted: formal indicators (size and structure) and substantive indicators (qualitative composition of elements and subjective assessment of difficulty of the situation). As individual psychological characteristics, according to the methods used, the authors of the article consider general intelligence, emotional stability, self-control level, hardiness, ambiguity tolerance, and action control. The correlation between some individual psychological characteristics (general intelligence, ambiguity tolerance, action control) and formal and substantive indicators of representation is revealed: quantitative features and structure of the system of semantic units are determined by the level of general intelligence and ambiguity tolerance; the specificity of subjective assessment of difficulty of the situation is determined by the action control scale.