SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MODERN RUSSIANS ABOUT THE LONELY PERSON

In the article results of studying of social representations of Russians about the lonely person are considered. The loneliness in the modern world has ceased to be for a long time a problem of the separate person, for the specific reasons not managed to adapt for a society, to build emotional mutual relations satisfying it with associates. It has turned to a serious social problem. Efficiency of the psychological help to lonely people, constructions and realizations of programs on preventive maintenance of chronic loneliness is in many respects connected with the account of the developed social representations about loneliness and the lonely person. Difficulties in studying of a phenomenon of loneliness are somewhat connected with necessity to receive the information which mentions deep intimate layers of the person. On the one hand, work mechanisms of psychological protection. The respondent starts to have a feeling of alarm because of necessity to give answers about itself, with another – the tendency to social desirability is shown. For minimization of these displays in research the method of the projective composition was used. During the content-analysis of the text information received by a method of projective compositions, 13 semantic components have been allocated, each of which opens certain lines of an image of the lonely person. Psychological interpretation of the received data has allowed to describe some prototypes of the lonely person developing in representations of contemporaries. The urgency of the use of a category "prototype" is connected with specific features of a social reality: complexity, dynamism, variability, a polysemy of the signs used for a categorization. According to model of frequency of signs, the prototype reflects most often meeting signs, accordingly, the prototype is acquired through fixing of the repeating elements inherent in an object, or a situation. The analysis of representations of respondents about the lonely person allows to allocate some developing prototypes: "careerist", «a lonely wolf», "homebody", " the unsocial person".