expert opinion

Dmitry LeontyevDoctor of Psychology

“It is resilience that determines our ability to withstand stress.”

Head of the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, National Research University graduate School Economics", professor at Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. Author of several books, including “The Psychology of Sense” (Sense, 2007).

“In modern psychology there is a very important concept– vitality. The term was first used by Suzanne C. Kobasa, but the main research on resilience comes from Salvatore Maddi. It is resilience that determines our ability to withstand stress. It is interesting that Muddy set out to study resilience in a situation somewhat reminiscent of the current Russian one, in a crisis situation.

In the 70s, managers from a large telecommunications company contacted the University of Chicago, where Muddy was working at the time. Contacted with a specific practical task. The United States then adopted strict laws related to the regulation of the telecommunications sector. And in order to comply with them, all enterprises in the industry inevitably needed to make large cuts. There was still almost a year left until the moment when people would have to be fired - the laws were adopted in advance. But all industry workers found themselves in a situation of severe stress - the sword of Damocles was raised over them. People knew that a quarter of all staff would be laid off from the beginning of next year. No one understood who would be included in this number, or on what basis they would be chosen. Therefore, absolutely everyone experienced stress. And managers came to psychologists for help.

After conducting a number of studies, Muddy and his colleagues came up with personal characteristics that are the main defense against stress and its negative consequences. Muddy identified three components of resilience that reinforce and reinforce each other. And the more they are present in a person, the lower the likelihood that in a situation of severe stress he will exhibit negative somatic or psychological symptoms.

The first component is inclusion.

Simply put, being among the events is always more advantageous than observing them from the sidelines. It is more profitable from the point of view of resistance to stress. A person who acts and is determined to act is better protected from stress than one who sits on the sidelines and waits... You know, I went to opposition rallies from time to time recent years, and when people asked me why I did it, I always answered: “Scientists have proven that it is good for health.” Bearing in mind precisely the first component of resilience according to Muddy.

The second component is control.

Even in the conditions in which we find ourselves, even understanding that we are not able to control the main, global things, we can always find something that we can take into our own hands. Start exercising control. Otherwise, by giving up trying to control anything, we give ourselves over to a very unpleasant effect, which is known in psychology as “learned helplessness.” This is a complete gap between a person's actions and what happens to him.

Muddy called the third component of resilience “challenge.”

However, I preferred to designate it in the Russian translation as “risk taking.” It is the willingness to act without a guarantee of success. Considering that even a negative experience is still useful, it is still an experience. And, as you know, even an insurance policy cannot give you a complete guarantee. People who are hesitant to act without complete guarantees that everything will be fine are much more vulnerable to stress than those who are ready to take action by accepting uncertainty.

All these traits are stable personal characteristics. But this does not mean that people are already born with them; they can be trained and influenced. There are appropriate psychodiagnostic methods, there are resilience trainings to identify these traits in yourself and strengthen them. Moreover, it is interesting that Muddy himself, conducting such trainings, received a paradoxical result. Usually during trainings measurements are taken: before the training, after it - and then after some time. To understand whether, firstly, the result was obtained, and secondly, whether it was preserved or turned out to be short-lived and everything “slipped” to its original values. Muddy measured the level of resilience of participants before the trainings, immediately after them and six months after their completion. And I found that the data from delayed testing - six months later - were even higher than the data immediately after the training. That is, the development of resilience triggers processes that then begin to work themselves. This is not just the formation of a trait: they put a person in jail, formed something and let him go. No, resilience in this sense - an attitude towards the world, a system of attitudes - is some other way of life. If we talk about psychological health, not physical health, then this is healthy image life. Psychologically healthy – and able to protect us in stressful situations.”

The cognitive dissonance variant of the coherence model examines the consistency or inconsistency between cognitive elements, typically expectations and perceptions of events. In contrast, the version of the coherence model that we will now consider here describes the consistency or inconsistency between habitual and actual levels of activation or tension. As with all coherence theories, content is relatively unimportant. Fiske and Muddy's theory is virtually the only activation concept relevant to personality. As you will see, it is more comprehensive than the cognitive dissonance model.

POSITION OF FISKE AND MUDDI

Donald W. Fiske was born in Massachusetts in 1916. After studying at Harvard, he received a doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1948. While engaged in teaching and research activities in a university setting, he made his main interest the problem of measuring personality variables and understanding the conditions under which human behavior exhibits variability. At Harvard and the Office of Strategic Communications during World War II, he came under the influence of Murray, Allport, and White. Fiske was president of the Midwest Psychological Association and is now co-director of the psychology department at the University of Chicago.

Salvatore R. Maddi was born in New York in 1933 and received his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1960. While he was at Harvard, he was fortunate to study with Allport, Beikan, McClelland, Murray and White. While studying professional activity in a university setting, combining teaching and research, Muddy was primarily interested in the need for diversity and personal change. Muddy's collaboration with Fiske began in 1960 and resulted over a number of years in the position presented below. Muddy is currently the Director of the Psychology Clinical Training Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Salvatore R. Maddi - Professor at the School social ecology University of California (School of Social Ecology at the University of California).

He was a student of Gordon Allport and Henry Murray and absorbed their holistic approach to personality, borrowing from them the concept of “personology” that seems somewhat old-fashioned today. At the same time, he became imbued with the existentialist way of thinking (for which Allport predicted a great future) and already in the 1970s gained fame as the author of the original concepts of needs, the desire for meaning, existential neurosis and existential psychotherapy.

For the last 15 years, the main focus of his work has been the research, diagnosis and facilitation of resilience - a core personal characteristic that underlies the “courage to be” according to P. Tillich and is largely responsible for an individual’s success in coping with adverse life circumstances.

Books (1)

Personality theories - comparative analysis

Psychology is a strange science. Once you think about her problems, everything immediately becomes unclear.

Well, in fact, does a person know why he thinks about something? Balzac accurately wrote in “Drama on the Seashore”: “Thoughts enter our hearts or heads without asking us.” A person is able to give himself an account only of what exactly he is aware of. But he cannot explain the transition from one of his thoughts to another.

We do not know how to be aware of the creation of thought. Thought is always present in our consciousness finished form. Therefore, perhaps it is generally more correct to say not “I think”, but “I think.” But what then is this mysterious “I”, which does not even seem to think for itself?

CONSISTENCY MODEL:
ACTIVATION OPTION

The cognitive dissonance variant of the coherence model examines the consistency or inconsistency between cognitive elements, typically expectations and perceptions of events. In contrast, the version of the coherence model that we will now consider here describes the consistency or inconsistency between habitual and actual levels of activation or tension. As with all coherence theories, content is relatively unimportant. Fiske and Muddy's theory is virtually the only activation concept relevant to personality. As you will see, it is more comprehensive than the cognitive dissonance model.

POSITION OF FISKE AND MUDDI

Donald W. Fiske was born in Massachusetts in 1916. After studying at Harvard, he received a doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1948. While teaching and researching in a university setting, he has made it his primary interest to measure personality variables and understand the conditions under which human behavior exhibits variability. At Harvard and the Office of Strategic Communications during World War II, he came under the influence of Murray, Allport, and White. Fiske was president of the Midwest Psychological Association and is now co-director of the psychology department at the University of Chicago.

Salvatore R. Maddi was born in New York in 1933 and received his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1960. While he was at Harvard, he was fortunate to study with Allport, Beikan, McClelland, Murray and White. Working professionally in a university setting, combining teaching and research, Muddy was primarily interested in the need for diversity and personal change. Muddy's collaboration with Fiske began in 1960 and resulted over a number of years in the position presented below. Muddy is currently the Director of the Psychology Clinical Training Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Activation theory represents a modern trend in psychology; it has had a significant impact on many branches of this scientific discipline. It is quite understandable that the field of personality research, given its complexity, has been influenced to the last and very small extent by activation theory. But Fiske and Maddi (1963; Maddi and Propst, 1963) proposed a version of activation theory that not only surpasses most others in completeness and systematicity, but is also quite applicable to personality problems. The cognitive dissonance variant of coherence theory focuses on the discrepancy or match between two cognitive elements, usually an expectation or belief on the one hand, and the perception of an event on the other. In the activation theory proposed by Fiske and Muddy, discrepancy is also a critical determinant of behavior. However, the discrepancy is not considered between two cognitive elements, but between the level of activation to which a person is accustomed and the level that he is currently experiencing. The discrepancy between habitual and actual levels of activation always gives rise to behavior aimed at reducing the discrepancy. Fiske and Muddy's position is therefore an example of the pure coherence model.

Let's start discussing this theory by first stating the core tendency: the person will strive to maintain his usual (characteristic) level of activation. To try to find in your personal experience As a basis for understanding the meaning of this core tendency, keep in mind that activation is a word that refers to your level of arousal, or liveliness, or energy. Try to remember times when something that happened made you more or less excited than usual, or required more or less liveliness and energy than usual. If you felt that a situation was too or not enough exciting for you and you tried to change it somehow, or you thought that the requirements for liveliness and energy were too great or too little and you tried to somehow correct it, then you have found the basis for the intuitive understanding of core aspiration proposed by Fiske and Muddy. It is possible that some of you may find it difficult to grasp the relevance of this to your life experiences without further, more detailed consideration of this position. I think this is due to the fact that the concept is quite new and unfamiliar, and also because the psychological borrowing of the concept of activation is not immediately obvious. Let us therefore hasten to a more detailed study of the position.

Habitual and current activation levels

According to Fiske and Muddy (1961, p. 14), activation is a neuropsychological concept that psychologically describes such common core meanings as alertness, alertness, tension, and subjective arousal; from the neurological side the state of excitation of a certain brain center. Obviously, from the psychological side, Fiske and Muddy are referring to a general level of activation in the body, similar to what many of the other scientists we mentioned called tension. Fiske and Muddy try to make this view more plausible and convincing by exploring the neural substrate behind it. On the neurological side, they suggest that the reticular formation, a large subcortical region of the brain, is the center of activation. In this they follow numerous predecessors (e.g., Samuels, 1959; Jasper, 1958; O'Leary and Coben, 1958) and attempt to integrate psychological and physiological levels of theorizing.

Having established a preliminary definition of activation, Fiske and Muddy turned to the problem of the determinants of this state of arousal. They identified three directions of stimulation and three sources of stimulation, combining all these characteristics influencing activation into one concept impact. The three dimensions of stimulation are intensity, significance And diversity. Intensity, defined in terms of physical energy, is an explicit property of stimulation. This describes the type of difference between a loud sound and a soft one. The significance needs more explanation. In a certain sense, everything that can be called a stimulus must have a meaning. If it didn't have a meaning, you wouldn't recognize it. In this sense, significance will be a certain general feature of stimulation that underlies all others, including intensity and variety. Fiske and Muddy offer a more limited definition of significance. They mean mainly the importance of the stimulus to the organism on which the stimulus has an effect. For example, the word “farewell” has less meaning for most people than the words “fire” or “love.” When considering diversity, Fiske and Muddy make a number of points. First of all, variety describes the state in which the current stimulus is different from the previous one, different in intensity or significance, or both. So one aspect of diversity is change. Another aspect of variety, novelty, that is, the state in which the current stimulus is unusual, is rare in a person's life experience as a whole, regardless of whether it is different from the stimulus that immediately preceded it. The final aspect of diversity is surprise, or a state in which a current stimulus deviates from what a person believes should happen, whether it is a change or unusual in a broader sense.

Talking about dimensions of stimulation that can influence activation encourages us to discuss sources of stimulation, if only for the sake of completeness. Fiske and Muddy specified three types of sources: exteroceptive, interoceptive And cortical. Exteroceptive stimulation includes chemical, electrical, mechanical stimulation of sensory organs susceptible to events outside world. In contrast, interoceptive stimulation refers to the stimulation of sense organs receptive to events occurring within the body itself. These two sources of stimulation are already well known and do not need explanation. But what is unusual is the consideration of cortical stimulation. Most psychologists who study psychological phenomena in the cerebral cortex tend to view them as a reflection of stimulation coming from other parts of the body or from the outside world. Fiske and Muddy propose to consider the cortex itself as one of the real sources of stimulation. Their point of view seems logical because the brain locus of activation is located in the subcortical region. Possible anatomical and physiological grounds may be the recent discovery that the cortex not only receives, but also sends nerve fibers towards the reticular formation, which, as you remember, is the very subcortical center. Hebb (1955) proposed that nerve fibers running from the cortex to the reticular formation may constitute the physiological substrate for understanding the “immediate driving force possessed by cognitive processes.”

For Fiske and Muddy, activation level is a direct function of exposure. The impact, in turn, is a direct function of the intensity, significance and variety of stimulation coming from interoceptive, exteroceptive and cortical sources. Activation, influence, directions and sources of influence are common to all people and are therefore characteristics of the core personality. Until now, Fiske and Muddy's theory may have seemed too complex and detached from psychologically important phenomena to be of much use to the personologist. But be patient, and the psychological significance of this position will soon become apparent. In terms of complexity, you have to recognize the possibility that the integrity that Fiske and Muddy were aiming for not only requires that level of complexity, but can also be very helpful in achieving understanding. You may have noticed, for example, that the discrepancy between expectation and reality so emphasized by McClelland and Kelly represents only one aspect of diversity in Fiske and Muddy. Other scientists make surprise a basic determinant of tension and anxiety, terms that differ little in meaning from what Fiske and Muddy term "activation." But once you become familiar with Fiske and Muddy's broad definition of the characteristics of impact-producing stimuli, you begin to wonder whether other scientists have oversimplified their views on the determinants of tension.

Having considered the actual level of activation, which is set at any particular time by the overall effect of stimulation, we can turn to to the usual level of activation. Fiske and Muddy believe that the levels of activation experienced by a person over many days tend to be relatively similar to each other. After all, the patterns and sequences of life should result in everyday similarities in the intensity, significance and variety of stimulation from various sources. Over time, a person should begin to experience a certain level of activation as normal, normal for a certain period of the day. These normal, ordinary, habitual levels of activation can be approximately measured by calculating the average of a person's actual activation curves over a period of several days. This measurement was made by Kleitman (1939), who discovered a pattern he called the cycle of existence. This cycle of existence is characterized by one major rise and fall during the waking period. After awakening, highly developed organisms usually show an increasing degree of alertness, then over a relatively long period there is a gradual increase, and later a gradual decline, and finally there is a sharp decline towards a state of rest and a return to the sleep state. Some physiological indicators, such as heart rate and body temperature, behave in the same way (Kleitman and Ramsaroop, 1948; Sidis, 1908). Fiske and Muddy believe that the curve described as the cycle of existence is the curve of habitual activation level. Because everyone has a habitual level of activation, although different people the curve can take different shape, this is a characteristic of the core of personality, and also, of course, the actual level of activation we discussed earlier.

Since you postulate the existence of actual and habitual levels of activation, it is almost natural to consider as an important characteristic the coincidence or mismatch between them. That's exactly what Fiske and Muddy do. Their core tendency describes a person's desire to maintain the level of activation familiar to a given time of day. If the actual activation deviates from the usual level, there is impact-modifying behavior. Two types of deviation are possible. If the current level of activation is higher than usual, there is impact-reducing behavior and if the current activation level is lower than usual impact-enhancing behavior. You should note that impact-reducing behavior would be an attempt to reduce the intensity, magnitude, or variety of stimulation coming from interoceptive, exteroceptive, and cortical sources, while the definition of impact-enhancing behavior would be the opposite.

Fiske and Muddy are considered proponents of the coherence theory because they consider the desire for coincidence between actual and habitual levels of activation to be the general direction of life. In explaining why people exhibit this core drive, Fiske and Muddy (1961) recognize that congruence between actual and habitual levels of activation is experienced as a state of well-being, while discrepancies between them lead to negative emotions, the severity of which increases with the degree of discrepancy. . And to avoid the uncomfortable experience of negative affect, people try to reduce the discrepancy between actual and habitual levels of activation, and the success of these attempts is experienced as positive affect.

Fiske and Muddy's theory is undoubtedly a consistency model, since the ideal state is the complete absence of discrepancies between actual and habitual levels of activation. It is not believed here, as in McClelland's theory, that a small degree of divergence is a positive phenomenon. But McClelland argued forcefully that positions like Kelly's were limited because they failed to capture the importance of boredom's concomitant interest in unexpected events. This point of view is shared by Fiske and Muddy, which is manifested in the fact that, in their opinion, actual activation can not only exceed the usual level, but also fall short of it. When the level of actual activation is too low, the person will actively seek stimulation with greater variety, significance, or intensity. In particular, this means that it will look for unexpected events. This feature of Fiske and Muddy's position is related to two others that are important enough to be worth mentioning. First of all, they do not consider stress relief to be the goal of all life activity, as do other supporters of pure correspondence models. Although their view is clearly one of consistency theories, Fiske and Muddy agree with McClelland that sometimes a person may strive to reduce tension or activation and sometimes to increase it. The second feature worth mentioning is that Fiske and Muddy believe that ordinary, everyday life situations bring some variety (change, novelty, surprise) as well as some intensity and significance. In other words, a slightly greater than minimal level of diversity is considered normal. This assumption is implicit in the proposition that the habitual level of activation is high enough throughout the day that the actual level of activation can actually lower it. For Fiske and Muddy, the assumption of other consistency theories that the ideal situation is the absence of surprise sounds somewhat ridiculous, since it obviously contradicts ordinary life. Fiske and Muddy agree with McClelland that a human being would be bored in a situation of complete certainty and predictability and that such a situation would generate too little stimulation to raise activation to habitual levels.

Fiske and Muddy's theory good example what is called the homeostatic position. In other words, whenever there is any deviation from the norm, in this case from the usual level of activation, an attempt is made to return to the normal state, which becomes stronger as the degree of deviation increases. There is a general tendency in psychology to view all theories of stress relief as homeostatic in nature. Thus, the concepts of Freud, Sullivan, Angyal, Bakan, Rank, Kelly and Festinger, and perhaps some others, could be called homeostatic theories. It amazes me that in fact these theories represent only half of the homeostatic model, since the norm they accept is a minimum state. This means that the norm can only be exceeded, but it cannot be missed. Fiske and Muddy's theory, compared to others, is truly a homeostatic position in which the norm is something greater than the minimum and less than the maximum. Having become acquainted with a theory like Fiske and Muddy, the partial inconsistency of other theories with the concept of homeostasis becomes apparent. Many concepts have been mentioned in the previous pages, and it may be useful to summarize them in core personality terminology at the end of this subsection. A person’s desire to maintain a characteristic or habitual level of activation at each moment of time represents a tendency of the personality core. This tendency does not vary from person to person; it permeates their entire existence. A number of characteristics of the personality core associated with this core tendency are identified. These are the actual activation level, the habitual activation level, the discrepancy between them, impact-enhancing behavior and impact-reducing behavior. For all people, these concepts are in the same relationships. To be clear, there are many sources of individual differences, to name just a few: habitual activation levels may differ, and there may be many ways to increase or decrease exposure, but we will discuss all of these issues in Chapter 8 on the periphery of personality.

Formation of a characteristic activation curve

Fiske and Muddy do not believe that a person is born with a habitual activation curve; perhaps it is formed as a result of life experiences. More precisely, they still suggest that genetic characteristics, not yet well understood, may predispose a person to have a certain height and shape in a person’s habitual activation curve. But the accumulated experience of experiencing a certain level of activation at certain points in the day will be expected to have a decisive influence on the formation of a characteristic activation curve. So first of all environment has a significant impact on humans as a major determinant of the characteristic activation curve. This determination occurs sometime in childhood, although Fiske and Muddy do not say anything very specific about this. In one sense, their vagueness is not very surprising, since we have seen that the coherence model pays little attention to the content of life experience and innate nature. For Kelly and McClelland, behavior is influenced by the very fact of the presence of a discrepancy between expectation and reality, and not by the content of the discrepancy. For Fiske and Muddy, it is the impact of early stimulation rather than its content that has the formative influence. Because you do not emphasize the importance of stimulus content and innate nature, you have little logical desire to develop a detailed theory of the stages of development in which the content of your desires and the content of the reactions of especially significant others will be important.

But Fiske and Muddy believe that as experience accumulates, as days pass one after another, a characteristic activation curve begins to take on a stable shape. Once established, this curve does not change very much under normal circumstances. This occurs due to the influence exerted on personality and experience by the desire to maintain activation at the characteristic level. It is important to distinguish here correction discrepancies between the actual and characteristic levels of activation that actually occur, and anticipatory attempts prevent such discrepancies (Maddi and Propst, 1963). We will consider anticipatory activity now, since it is the basis for understanding why the characteristic activation curve does not change once formed, and we will consider corrective activity later. As experience accumulates, a person learns certain habitual ways of living that help prevent large discrepancies between the actual and characteristic levels of activation. These ways of influencing the present and future intensity, salience, and variety of stimuli from interoceptive, exteroceptive, and cortical sources form a large part of the periphery of the personality. If the periphery of the personality successfully expresses the tendency of the core, then conditions under which the characteristic activation curve would change do not occur. A person's range of experiences and activities is selected and maintained so as to result in exposure at different points in the day so that actual levels of activation match characteristic levels. Perhaps the longer a person lives, the more stable his characteristic activation curve becomes. Only if he were to remain for a long time in conditions with unusual levels of stimulation (an example would be the battlefield), would stimulation conditions be created that could change the characteristic activation curve.

Anticipatory and corrective attempts to maintain consistency

You might think that Fiske and Muddy, like Freud, believe that personality remains essentially unchanged after childhood, but in fact this is not the case. Although the habitual activation curve is thought to remain approximately the same under normal circumstances, the behavior and personality processes that express the predictive function of the core tendency must actually change for the curve to remain unchanged. This may seem paradoxical, but in reality everything is very simple and clear. One of the functions of anticipation processes is to protect future activation levels from falling below characteristic levels. But this statement must be understood in conjunction with the fact that any stimulation, regardless of its initial impact, will lose its impact over time. We adapt to stimulation if it continues long enough. We stop noticing a sound that seemed loud at first if it continues long enough. Over time, something significant becomes commonplace. Variety has a particularly short lifespan, since any new or unexpected stimulus greatly reduces its impact so that it can become boring. A large body of experimental evidence supports the conclusion that the initial impact of stimulation diminishes as the time during which it is experienced continues (see Fiske and Maddi, 1961).

This means that the longer a person lives, the more often they must change their anticipatory techniques, preventing future activation levels from falling to too low, uncomfortable levels. As for actions, he must constantly expand the range of his activities and interests. As far as thoughts and feelings are concerned, he must become more and more refined and differentiated, since this is how it can be ensured that future stimulation actually produces more strong impact than it would feel at the moment. If you look at a Jackson Pollack painting right now, it may have little impact on you, as it appears to be nothing more than a blur of paint, best case scenario repetitive. But by increasing the subtlety of your cognitive and affective processes, you will become much more sensitive to the same picture when you see it in the future. Then perhaps it will make a great impression, as you will be able to perceive the many layers of paint applied layer after layer, and the subtle differences between parts of the canvas. Regardless of whether we agree on Jackson Pollack's assessment, I think you understand what it means constant growth cognitive and emotional differentiation as the basis for ensuring that activation does not fall too low in the future. The attempt to approach the point where the universe can be seen in a grain of sand expresses a cognitive, affective refinement of the experience to compensate for its natural tendency to lose impact as it continues or is repeated.

But in order to properly maintain the characteristic level of activation, a person must also master anticipatory techniques to protect future influence from rising above the characteristic level. This is especially necessary to counterbalance the possible, albeit accidental, side effects of anticipatory attempts to keep activation from falling below the characteristic level. When you try to ensure this by becoming more cognitively, affectively and operationally differentiated, you cannot predict with absolute certainty how it will all end. If you continually increase your search for new and more meaningful and intense experiences, you increase the likelihood of a crisis in which your ability to keep things within limits is compromised. You may unintentionally expose yourself to such a powerful influence that the result is uncomfortable. high level activation. Let us clarify: if this really happened, the person, according to this theory, would become very active in correcting the high level of activation. But it would be ineffective for a person to wait until activation becomes very high without taking any action, just as it is ineffective to rely on correcting the level of activation that has fallen too low.

Progressive cognitive, affective, and activity differentiation is an anticipatory technique for maintaining high activation, but how can one keep activation low enough? Muddy and Propet (1963) show that the way to ensure that activation levels do not become too high in the future is the increasing development of mechanisms and techniques for integrating elements of cognition, emotion, and action, differentiated to ensure that activation does not become too high. low. The essence of integration is the organization of differentiated elements into broad categories of function or significance. Integration processes allow you to see how individual experiences are similar in meaning and intensity to other experiences, no matter how different they may be based on more specific analyzes that serve as manifestations of differentiation processes. There is no conflict between the processes of differentiation and integration. No matter how sensitive you have become to our Jackson Pollack canvas based on differentiation processes, you can also place this canvas in general scheme his work, the work of his contemporaries and art history, using processes of integration. The function of integrative processes is to prevent future levels of activation from becoming too high without depriving the individual of the capacity for sensitive experiences necessary to avoid distress. low levels activation.

In fact, as you can see, the proposed personality image involves constant changes throughout life; these changes serve to maintain minimal differences between actual and habitual levels of activation. Change involves progressive differentiation and integration, or what we used to call "psychological growth." This concept is present in the versions of actualization and perfection of the self-realization model, although the emphasis may be placed differently. This concept is not typical for theories of psychosocial conflict, although it plays a certain role in theories of intrapsychic conflict. Fiske and Muddy are the only representatives of the coherence model to use the concept of psychological growth. In fact, their approach appears to be more fruitful than that of self-actualization or enhancement theorists because Fiske and Muddy explain psychological growth in terms of the expression of a core tendency rather than simply seeing it as a component of that tendency itself.

Now we can return not to anticipation, but to correctional processes in order to understand their special significance. First of all, it is obvious that correction of the discrepancy between the actual and characteristic levels of activation is necessary only when anticipatory processes have failed. In an adult, attempts at correction are in the nature of emergency maneuvers (Maddi and Propst, 1963). To put it simply in simple language Muddy and Propst believe that impact-reducing behavior, aimed at reducing the actual level of activation that has already exceeded the characteristic level, distorts reality in the sense that it allows one to ignore the impact of stimuli that actually occurs. They believe that exposure-increasing behavior, aimed at increasing the actual level of activation that is already below the characteristic level, also distorts reality, but such distortion adds something to the stimulation that is not actually present. These sensitizing and desensitizing aspects of correctional behavior closely approach one of the aspects of the traditional understanding of the term "protection". But we must be careful to understand that Muddy and Propet do not mean the active exclusion from consciousness of the drives and desires that form an existing but dangerous part of the personality itself. They simply suggest that there is a mechanism for exaggerating or minimizing the actual effects of stimulation. In this they come closer to the concept of protection than all other representatives of the consistency model.

More generally, Fiske and Muddy's framework is a consistency theory that focuses on the discrepancy between actual and habitual activation rather than on the accuracy of predictions. It is formulated broadly enough to include other correspondence theories that make the same emphasis. In Fiske and Muddy's concept, behavior and personality are partly oriented toward reducing tension and partly toward increasing it. In this respect, this approach resembles McClelland's theory, although it is closer to the traditional correspondence model than to its variant. Fiske and Muddy, like other representatives of the correspondence model, are eclectic in their approach to content, their ideas about man and society contain few inevitable and unchanging characteristics. They believe that the essential traits of the core personality remain constant, but the periphery of the personality constantly changes throughout life to meet the demands of the core tendency. Constant change occurs in the direction of a simultaneous increase in differentiation and integration or psychological growth.