PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF TV-DEPENDENT PERSONALITY. PROBLEM STATEMENT

The article deals with the analysis of the personality in the modern informational world problem. The author based the theoretical analysis of this problem on the specifics of the current stage in psychological studies of mass communication. The author assumes that social constructivism, as a postmodernist approach and the theoretical basis of modern studies in mass communication, considers the way mass communication participants construct their idea of the world and its peculiarities. The concept of the “mosaic-resonance effect” is interpreted as the main feature of the nowadays mass media's messages. The author analyzes the discourse as an instrument used to examine the construction of one's idea of the world during mass communication. The main characteristics of the two models of mass communication: the discourse model by J.Fiske and the constructivist model by W.Gamson, are reviewed in detail. The empirical study outcomes have shown the perspectives of further studies of the mass media's psychological influence on the peculiarities of the person's way to construct the image of the world and one's means of interpreting communicative signals to be prospective. Our empirical study demonstrated that subjects referred to as TV-dependent (those who tend to spend a lot of time watching the TV content) are characterized by non-stable emotions, less considerate in linking and analyzing the details of the given information, its' non-critical perception. TV-dependent respondents mostly perceive the TV data non-adequately, paying attention to emotionally meaningful pieces of information, and tending to reconstruct their image of the event, so that it might be an illustration or general background of the TV content piece, or the information of the lower levels of semantic structure in terms of A.A.Bodalyov.