Modifying impact of the concepts on consciousness and behaviour of the adolescents (on the example of the concept “shame”)

Abstract

The subject of the research is the concept “shame” as an ethical category that has a modifying influence on the consciousness of the adolescents — high school students. The importance of this ethical idea as a social regulation mechanism of human behavior is highlighted in the works devoted to the study of this concept from the standpoints of philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethnology. To reveal the understanding of the concept of “shame” by high school students, we used the method of modeling its meaningful features, named by adolescents in the process of self-reflection, taking into account statistical data. The article presents an analysis of the content of this concept in adolescents’ minds, reveals the main content features of its lexical representations of various morphological nature: an emotion as an objectified entity; the mental state of a person; mental processes associated with this emotion occurring in the inner world of a person. The authors made an attempt to determine the influence of the concept “shame” and the degree of this influence on the modification of adolescent behavior. It is important for the research to establish a connection between the concept “shame” existing in the minds of adolescents, its semantic features and the degree of its influence on their actions and behaviour that is the determination of its effectiveness as a mechanism of social modification and regulation. The study identified the factors that affect the insufficient regulatory and modification effectiveness of the concept “shame”, which indicates the need to take into account the characteristics of moral development at the adolescent stage when organizing purposeful work on the formation of ideas about shame, on their inclusion in practical activities in order to regulate, modify and correct the ethical consciousness and
behaviour of the students.