Abstract:

The affective (emotional and value) component of the university student’s professional consciousness is a reflection of the subject’s attitude towards his academic and professional activity, to himself as a future specialist, or to individual professionally significant aspects of his personality and activity.

According to a Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, affective structures play a crucial role in the individual’s consciousness as they correlate with the cognitive mechanisms of the human consciousness and build “a unified system or unity of affect and intellect” ([1], [2]). Affective components of the consciousness consist of emotions, moods, feelings and possess a number of functions that define the success and efficiency of the individual’s activity: evaluation and prompting functions, regulating and synthesizing functions, expressive, activation and signal functions.

It is essential to mention that successfully managing the affective component of the university students’ consciousness may define their attitude towards the whole academic process, their future career and life itself. The contemporary media environment people are living today, no doubt, makes an impact on the young people’s affects, emotions and values. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to identify and evaluate how far the present-day media world influences the affective component of the students’ consciousness, whether this impact changes the young people’s attitude towards their education and career goals and which affects and emotions the students experience when referring to the media environment in search for knowledge and professional issues.

Our experiment has covered the university students of three higher education institutions – Moscow State Pedagogical University, RUDN University and South Ural State Humanitarian Pedagogical University in two regions of Russian Federation (Moscow and Chelyabinsk regions) which also helped to see the similarities and differences in the young people’s affective perception of their academic and professional achievements through the prism of the new media environment. Recommendations on how to handle the emotional and value components of the students’ consciousness while teaching them at the university were given in the conclusion of the research.

References:
[1] L. Vygotsky, Pedagogical psychology. Pedagogics, 1991.
[2] C. Izard, Human emotions. New York: Plenum, 1977.

Keywords:

Affective component of the consciousness, university students, media environment, education, academic and professional achievements, affects, emotions, values.