Folk Game as Sociocultural Means of PreventingDeviant Behaviour

Abstract

Role-playing can be used as one of the possible means of early professional training in legal psychologists. Defining play-based practice as the content of education eliminates the problem of professional and learning motivation during the first semesters of study. Folk game is considered a cultural form that helps create a developmental, corrective and preventive environment for working with deviant behaviours. The most significant causes of deviant behaviour are commonly thought to be one’s lack of both psychoemotional experience and psychophysiological preconditions for its acquisition. The key factors in an individual’s ability to establish social relations and organise behaviour are his/her experience in communication, ability to take into account other people’s emotional states and to display his/her own states and needs for others to consider. The resources of folk games, apart from them being a cultural form of traditional communication, are the following: the strictness of rules which, at the same time, provide only the framework to the game, thus not interfering with creative activity and improvisation; the richness of images, meanings and emotions in plots; the value of the very process of the game to its participants; the freedom of self-determination for those entering the game; the equality of all participants in regard to roles and rules.