Psychological security as a condition of development of personal potential

In recent years, psychologists are actively engaged in developing the concept of personal potentiality which is defined as an integral personality characteristic being a basis in an individual's capacity to proceed from sustainable internal criteria and landmarks in his/her life activity and keep the activity and meaningful orientations stable in case of pressing and changing external environment. In particular, one can make use of resilience, purposefulness and personal growth as essential parameters of personal potentiality. It was suggested that their manifestation depended on a sense of psychological safety which young males and females experienced. Psychological security is one of an individual's basic needs. In its turn, it is based on three categories constituting the core of an individual's subjective world: 1) perceived benevolence of the world; 2) meaningfulness of the world; 3) worthiness of the self. The becoming of psychological security occurs in the early childhood through interaction with significant adults affecting formation of a child's world assumptions about the world and other people. Therefore, we supposed that the development of a positive set of world assumptions, out of which psychological security was formed, was one of the most essential conditions for the development of personality. For this hypothesis to be confirmed, the investigation in a sample of undergraduates was conducted. Analysis of the data obtained indicated that the subjects were characterized by average levels of world assumptions scores and personal potentiality parameters. Such parameters of personal potentiality as purposefulness, autonomy, personal growth, competence and self-acceptance were indeed directly proportional to those of psychological security. However, statistically significant correlations between the world assumptions scales and the resilience scores were not revealed. In this connection, it was proposed that world assumptions and beliefs which determined resilience might represent two quite independent subsets of an individual's assumptions governing his/her behaviour in various life situations. Factor analysis of the data obtained has confirmed the hypothesis put forward

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