Позитивные изменения. Том 3, № 2 (2023). Positive changes. Volume 3, Issue 2 (2023)

The Psychosemantic methods are also in studying the perception of political and socio-cultural issues, as they enable the identification of underlying attitudes and stereotypes that may remain concealed or hard to detect due to social undesirability (Petrenko, Gladkikh Mitina, 2016; Gaivoronskaya, 2018). Moreover, these methods find use in investigating altered states of consciousness. For instance, V. F. Petrenko, together with V. V. Kucherenko, compared semantic spaces during hypnotherapy to observe the dynamics of changes in individuals’ worldview (Petrenko et al., 2006). It is safe to say that there are few areas of psychology left where one cannot find examples of the use of psychosemantic tools. The results obtained strongly advocate for the popularization of the method of constructing subjective semantic spaces for studying social representations.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF PSYCHOSEMANTICS

In linguistic dictionaries, “semantics” is defined as the meaning conveyed by a sign, be it a symbol, word, text, or utterance in the broadest sense. It is a branch of linguistics that examines the semantic significance of language units. Psychosemantics, on the other hand, is a field of psychology that investigates the structure, formation, and functioning of an individual or collective subject’s system of meanings.

At the core of psychosemantics lies the “Subjective Semantic Space,” which represents a person’s categorization structure as a mathematical field. The coordinate axes within this space correspond to the inherent grounds of categorization, as shown in Figure 1 (Petrenko, Kucherenko Vyalba, 2006).

The semantic space serves as a research tool that allows identifying semantic relationships between objects and analyzing their structure. The construction of a semantic space involves three key steps (Petrenko, 1982):

1. In the first stage, semantic connections between objects are analyzed using such methods as associative experiments and subjective scaling. This step results in the construction of a similarity matrix that encapsulates the internal structure of the semantic space.

2. In the second stage,

the similarity matrix is subjected to mathematical processing to uncover the underlying factors or clusters. This typically entails using various techniques such as factor analysis, multivariate scaling, and cluster analysis. It is important to note that mathematical processing does not generate new content but allows for the presentation of raw data in a concise and well-structured format.

3. In the third stage, the selected structures are interpreted by searching for semantic invariants that unite the objects grouped within a factor or cluster. Competent experts are involved, and reference objects are introduced to formulate hypotheses about the content of the factors.

PSYCHOSEMANTICS IN CINEMA: A CASE STUDY

The application of psychosemantics in cinema assumes a crucial role as it uncovers the genesis, structure, and functioning of individual and collective systems of meanings portrayed in cinematic images and reality. Each viewer, immersed in the events on the screen, identifies with specific characters, and different scenes evoke distinct emotions in each person. Cinemalogy highlights fundamental codes that foster free strategies and imagination to enhance humanistic values like personal worth, responsibility, cooperation, evolution, freedom, and spirituality (Strelkova, 2009; Yanovsky, 2010). Numerous studies have explored the psychosemantics of film art, including analyses of movies such as “Stalker,” “The Barber of Siberia,” “Rashomon,” and others (Petrenko et al., 2014).

To provide a clearer illustration of this approach, let us turn to V. F. Petrenko’s work, “Psychosemantic Analysis of the Feature Film The Barber of Siberia’” (Petrenko, 2005).

Experiment Procedure. After collectively watching the film, the respondents were asked to formulate bipolar constructs that contrast the characters (using G. Kelly’s Triadic Choice methods)[2].

Figure 2. Semantic space depicting the relationships between characters of the feature film ‘The Barber of Siberia’ by Factor 3 and Factor 4

The experiment involved 100 students from various universities in Moscow, both males and females. As a result, the respondents formulated 1,038 constructs, averaging about 10 constructs per person.