AN INDIVIDUAL’S PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY IN THE UNSTABLE WORLD

Abstract

The article analyses theoretically the concept of psychological safety as it is understood in psychology and presents the empirical study of students-future psychologists’ feeling of psychological safety in terms of their propensity to risk and their psychological hardiness as a prerequisite for a personal ability to resist danger. It is stated that the problem of an individual’s psychological safety in the situation of quarantine isolation and COVID-2019 pandemic is especially actual, even comes to the fore and requires thorough analysis and careful study in the context of the current objective situation in Ukraine and the world. The need for safety and protection from various threats is an individual’s fundamental need, further self-development and self-realization depend on its satisfaction; but an average person begins to realize this fact only after losing a sense of psychological safety. In scientific sources, psychological safety is more often seen as a means helping achieve / obtain something desired instead of understanding it as a goal. The interpretations of psychological safety, its structure, levels and factors supporting it presented by different scientists and its relation to informational-psychological security are analyzed. After the performed review of scientific psychological literature, the phenomenon of psychological safety was generalized as a complex, integral dynamic phenomenon; an individual’s state and feeling of being protected from external and internal threats; controllability of life events; an individual’s confidence in their ability to resist possible and existing threats; satisfaction of an individual’s basic needs and life as a whole for the further development and self-realization. We understand psychological safety as an individual’s sense of security in a safe world and a willingness to protect and restore that feeling when needed, resulting in the individual’s satisfaction with life. It is concluded that the studied students’ individual psychological hardiness with its components and the components of their sense of safety were not sufficiently developed. However, we can assume that psychological safety is more often experienced by people with developed psychological hardiness and its components: commitment to life; control over things happening in life, in particular, in stressful situations, and risk acceptance as a life challenge, as a result of which an individual can learn valuable life lessons helping them to become wiser for further self-realization.