PROBLEM OF HUMAN PROSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN A STRUCTURE OF EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

Abstract

Necessity of modernization and development of academic educational programs is discussed in the presented article. It is noted that transformation of university education in Ukraine requires the updating of informational content offered to the future professionals. Selection of the newest ideas and inclusion them into the structure of academic courses are the important tasks of modern education. Prosocial development, as a new area of psychological research, should take its rightful place within the educational programs for human-oriented specialists. Prosocial behavior is considered a special type of person’s social activity focused on supporting the Others, providing them with assistance and helping them in realization of their intentions. The authors emphasize that the dispositional basis, underling that type of behavior, is prosociality  a personal trait that has a complex structure and a long path of ontogenetic formation. On the authors opinion the issue of human prosociality should be included in the curriculum of such disciplines as developmental and social psychology. However, the presentation of certain issues of the problem should be consistent with the main objectives of the courses. Within the course of social psychology, it is worth to familiarize the future psychologists and teachers with the essence of the concepts of "prosocial behavior" and "prosociality", their dispositional and situational determination, the main types of short-term and long-term forms of social behavior. The program of developmental psychology should be supplemented with materials of age-related genesis of prosociality and prosocial behavior from the emergence of elementary forms of assistance in early childhood to mature forms of individual’s behavior in adulthood.