Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to investigate the specific peculiarities personality traits of adult psychology students. For this aim, we compared two samples: the first of them was consisted of 50 adult psychology students, which were taking a retraining course of practical psychology and the second one included 50 people who were not psychologists (aged between 25 and 48 for both). There were only women. The respondents completed the questionnaires: The 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (R. Cattell), Cook – Medley Hostility Scale, Rosenberg’s Faith in People Scale, Acceptance of Others Scale (W.F. Fey) and Communicative attitude Scale (V. Boyko). On the base of the conducted study, a psychological profile of adult psychology students was created and their peculiar traits were observed. The results of the Mann-Whitney U-test showed several significant differences between these two subgroup. Psychology students showed more dominance and assertiveness (p = 0,023). At the same time, they were more femininity, prone to romanticism, the artistic jury, and the aesthetic perception of the world. We can discuss the prerequisites for the development of the capacity for empathy and understanding other people. At the same time this factor demonstrates a need for attention, assistance, which is often one of the reasons for the sought of psychological help (p = 0.001). They had higher imagination, focus on the inner world, considerable creativity (p = 0.011), they had a normal level of frustration, satisfaction, whereas people who are not related to psychology were also significantly higher tension, the presence of anxiety, often manifested irritability and intolerance (p = 0.01). The adult students had higher level of trust to other people (p = 0.001). They were more accepting towards people (p = 0.01). Hostility was significantly higher among psychology students (p = 0.015). However, psychology students had much more positive communicative attitude in communication (p = 0.05). In addition, the differences of correlations between the studied traits in adult psychology students and non-psychologists were identified. Therefore, the results of this study added a more concrete data about personality and communicative characteristics of adult psychology students and the specificity of relations between these traits.

There were main limits of our study:
1) the sample consisted only women,
2) a limited sample,
3) sample was imbalanced on the criterion of age,
4) only one criterion for comparative analysis.

The results of this investigation can help improve contents of the professional retraining programs for practical psychologists and providing psychological individual and group counselling with them.

Keywords:

Personality traits, communicative traits, retraining course, adult psychology students.