Theoretical and methodological approaches to the understanding of internality as a psychological phenomenon

The concept of internality refers to the psychology of processes and mechanisms, performing which а person takes possession of his behavior when the cause of what is happening belongs to his own activity. The purpose of the article is to reveal basic theoretical and methodological approaches to the understanding of internality and to formulate several problematic issues regarding the comprehension of this phenomenon. Internality category is substantively incoherent; it contains а number of relatively independent concepts. The main concepts are: locus of control, as a generalized experience of the control of reinforcements (J. Rotter), locus of causality, as the tendency to perceive events as reasons by persons own activity (F. Haider, B. Weiner), the concept of Self-reinforcement (A. Bandura), tendency to make decisions based on internal values and motivational orientation (B. Weiner, D. Riesman), the locus of causal orientations (in self-determination theory of E. Deci, R. Ryan). Numerous studies indicate the sustainable relationships between various aspects of inter-nality with the wide range of psychological characteristics: cognitive complexity, depth, eventfulness of subjective temporal perspective, overall personal temporal-competence, the ability of value-semantic regulation of behavior, developed voluntariness, responsibility, and adaptability. In addition, internality is an important factor of the effectiveness of the internal personal choice activity, as a complicated behavioral act of resolving situations of uncertainty. Internality is being formed during a person's interaction with the world as a result of generalization of interaction experiences and depends on internal, social, and cultural factors. The analysis allows us to talk about the internality as an integral personality characteristic, indicating the uniqueness of the flow of psychological phenomena which constitute the processes of active generation of uncertainty and its subjective, intentional and responsible resolving in the implementation of personal choice. It is reasonable to pose a question regarding the structural complexity of internality including the issue of two levels of the internal behavior implementation: focus on the subjective attitude towards reality (regulating aspect) and personal competence, which allows realizing this direction in the various life situations with greater or lesser efficiency (instrumental aspect). The instrumental aspect of internality (what and with what psychological means a person chooses while making a personal choice) was studied in some details. The regulating aspect (what is the nature and the factors of the current inclination to the internal activity) is a relevant question in the field of the psychological theory

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