Social emotional development

Our periodization (being cyclic by its nature) of the socio-historical development is constructed on the basis of the biunited socio-psychological process of development of a person and the society. In this case, it is understandable that a social essence reveals itself both on the public level and the personal one. The properties of these subjects are transformed in the process of transition from the individual state to the collective one. A group thinks, feels, and acts otherwise than its individual members.
The main aim is the development of a universal approach to the elaboration of structural forms of a model which will reflect the socio-historical and psychological aspects.
In the XIXth century, the French psychologist J. Piaget developed the concept of the psychology of activity. According to this concept, any behaviour of a man involves the power, structural, or cognitive aspects.
Those which are named in life by common sense as “feeling” and “intellect” by considering them as two “abilities” opposite to each other, are two forms of behaviour. The first form is directed to the people, and the second — to ideas or things. In this case, each form possesses both the cognitive and affective aspects of action which are always combined in real life and are not independent abilities in any way.
Many psychologists established the divisibility and, at the same time, interrelation of two above-mentioned spheres (emotional-affective and intellectual). This interrelation really exists, but psychologists failed for a long time to clarify it. This problem was solved by D. El’konin (1971) within the frameworks of the theory of activity which develops in the system “child in society” (the term was introduced by O. Leont’ev). This system is composed from the subsystems “child — thing” (child is a public object) and “child — adult” (child — public relations).

By considering the leading man’s activity, he found the hidden (such that appears at the surface during the so-called psychological crisis) dialectical discrepancy between its two aspects: the operation-technical aspect (“intellectual-structural”, by J. Piaget) which is associated with the development of the subsystem “child — thing” and the emotional-motivative one which is related to the development of the subsystem “child — adult”.
Respectively, the general sequence of leading activities in the course of the vital cycle of a man includes alternating activities with the priority development of one of man’s features by forming, in such a way, the social cycles of development of a person in ontogenesis.

The age psychology separates rather clearly the above-mentioned social cycles and periods (epochs) of the psychic development of a person up to the age of 17. Unfortunately, the further psychic development of a person is still badly described (from the viewpoint of separation of social cycles and their periods). By solving this problem, we employed (1992) the original method of analysis of age cohorts which enabled us to verify the required cohorts to within one year.
The application of the given method in Ukraine showed that the upper bound of pensionary age for the population of Ukraine was 63–64 as of the time of measurement. In light of the obtained result, one may agree with the criticism
which the International Labour Organization utters on Ukraine’s address for a long time by attracting attention to the necessity of increasing the upper bound of pensionary age.

By analyzing the above-mentioned discrepancy, the authors paid attention also to a disagreement in the periodizations of psychic development of a person derived in the experiments of J. Piaget and soviet psychologists.
In particular, the boundaries of periods of psychic development which were established by J. Piaget differ from the appropriate results got by soviet psychologists approximately by 1.5–2 years. In the experiments of J. Piaget, they are “shifted” to the side of greater ages (Fig. 1). Such a shift can be mainly explained, in our opinion, by the peculiarities of socio-historical conditions and their influence on the psychic development of a man under the West (post-industrial) and Soviet (industrial) socio-historical conditions.

One can characterize the phenomenon of interrelation of the individual and public psychics through the notion of “societal” brought into the scientific turnover by A. Keller in 1903. This notion determines the general-systemic properties of a society as a social whole. Respectively, the new notion of “societal psychics” gives a possibility to integrate three basic levels of the social,
by the definition of P. Sorokin: man, society, and civilization.