Personality’s emotional ecological safety: Phenomenological analysis and research prospects

Abstract

The introduction describes intrascientific and sociocultural factors that determine the difficulties of studying research problems of psychology of a personality’s emotional sphere, and highlights its insufficiently studied issues. The solution to these issues may offer new prospects of the development of fundamental and applied knowledge of the essence of human nature. The author suggests examining a personality’s ecological safety in expressing and controlling feelings as one of the heuristic objectives. The theoretical analysis aims at the phenomenon of a personality’s emotional ecological safety. Its description is based on the ideas of personality ecology that have recently emerged in the field of psychology. The author introduces and defines the notion of a personality’s emotional ecological safety as a complex ability to generate and express psychologically safe for a personality and other people, eco-sensitive, proactive reaction to the events and emotional behavior of other people. The research identifies the components of emotional ecological safety connected with the ways of expressing empathy, interest and trust in another person’s feelings, giving him or her freedom of emotional experience, and readiness to neutralize other people’s negative emotions, regulation of one’s own emotional expressiveness, the locus of control over emotions. The conclusion outlines the prospects for designing psychodiagnostic tools to find the ability of a personality’s emotional ecological safety and application of the results of further empirical research in the positive psychological counseling.