The article reveals the notion of distance education, meaning formation, meaningful technologies. The modern concept of psychological and pedagogical support of talent is associated with the concept of the child’s abilities disclosure in education. Discussion about the developing potential of distance education, where, on the one hand, the student’s development potential is flattened, compressed and translated into “one-dimensional space” in the process of education; on the other hand, there is a whole range of opportunities to initiate independent activity of students, to include mechanisms of cognitive and personal development of a modern student. The psychological bases of active learning technologies in distance education of gifted students are described. The author’s classification of interactive learning technologies using remote technologies is considered, where each technology finds several concrete embodiments. The results of an experimental study of gifted students’ independent activity initiation in distance education are presented.

The article presents an analysis of using distance learning technology in university education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attitude of students to this format of education. The authors justify the urgency of the problem under study for modern education and update the basic requirements for education in the situation of growing uncertainty. The paper describe the methodological foundations and genesis of the development of distance learning, distinguishes the concepts of "distance education" and "distance learning". The authors determine the features of distance learning in modern conditions and highlight the main problems and contradictions that were provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the social isolation. The aim of this study is to evaluate emotional attitude of university students of the humanities and natural sciences to distance learning, implemented in the pandemic situation. The presented results of an empirical study reveal the pros and cons of distance learning, the active use of Internet resources by students in learning, and the willingness to rebuild in a changing environment.

The core problem of the COVID-19 pandemic for psychologists is to find out how people cope with the stress of isolation and the threat of fatal disease. The scale of the pandemical impact on the psychological well-being of an individual has still no knowledge and psychological predictors which the impact depends on need to be identified. This paper presents an empirical study of informational behavior and its psychological predictors in the pandemic. The research was held online in April-May 2020. The total amount of 165 participants, aged from 18 to 66. The subjects were chosen from a randomly selected sample. The participants were asked to estimate their informational consumption in pandemic. Tolerance to ambiguity, hardiness and anxiety was studied in groups distinguished according to changes in informational consumption. The findings of this study indicate a significant correlation between informational behavior and psychological characteristics related to coping with stress. Besides the analysis proved a negative correlation between reactive and personal anxiety and tolerance to ambiguity, hardiness and its components. We have confirmed that increased informational comsumption can be considered as a coping strategy for overcoming the pandemic social isolation among respondents with low hardiness and tolerance to ambiguity. Stable and decreased informational consumption indicates that respondents with high hardiness and tolerance to ambiguity and low state and trait anxiety don’t need to consume information for coping with difficulties of pandemic self-isolation. Future work will concentrate on expanding the list of psychological predictors of informational behavior and studying the features of their interaction in different situations.

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The authors conducted a study aimed at studying the characteristics of students with different models of information behavior in connection with the changes in psychological boundaries when using Internet technologies. The article reveals the role of information technologies and technical means, which become an important component of the life of a modern person and change his living space. The authors show the influence of information technologies on mental processes and relationships of people and consider the features of information behavior in connection with possible violation of psychological boundaries when using technical means The article analyses the problem of diagnosing information behavior and contains an overview of diagnostic methods of studying Internet addiction. It’s shown that in modern world information behavior is needed to be studied outside the context of addictive behavior. In the empirical part of the study authors distinguish the models of information behavior: entertaining, informational, communicative, productive and pragmatic. The empirical study defines the main behavioral characteristics of the presented information behavior models and investigate the changes in psychological boundaries when using the Internet among students with different models of information behavior. The results of the study allow to reveal the subjective attitude of students to the possibilities and availability of Internet resources in connection with differences in the severity of the expansion of psychological boundaries in communication, in the reflection of violation of boundaries, in changing needs.

The relevance of the study is due to the need for a deeper understanding of the factors that influence the formation of ethnic identity of modern youth. Most scientists agree that ethnic identity is formed mainly spontaneously, in the process of primary socialization of the individual, but this process is subject to the same spontaneous influences throughout the entire period of growing up. The mass media and the Internet space are the most powerful factors influencing modern people, including in the sphere of forming ideas about their ethnic group, its traditions and culture. The article presents the results of an empirical study conducted at the Don State Technical University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, with a total sample of 100 people. Authors revealed significant differences in the psychological characteristics of students with different types of ethnic identity: hypo-identity, normal identity and hyper-identity. It was also revealed that the media is one of the factors in the formation of negative types of ethnic identity: students with hypoidenticity and hyperidenticity mainly receive information about other ethnic groups from media sources; students with normal identity receive such information in the family or from the close environment. Further research will be aimed at studying the information behavior of students with different types of ethnic identity, which will allow us to develop recommendations for preventing the spread of destructive forms of behavior on the Internet.

Strategies of meaning formation are included in the highest level of regulation of an individual life. The article presents the results of empirical determination of the polar meaning strategies marker. In the initial modeling of the meaning formation processes, two polar strategies are proposed: adaptive and developmental. The system of personal meanings occupies a central place in the structure of the personality and is correlated with its properties manifested in interactions. For an empirical description of polar strategies, we developed nine scales of personality properties according to the type of private semantic differential. In these bipolar semantic scales, we used words that denote personality traits that act as indicators of meaning. An empirical study was carried out with the use of various techniques for studying semantic regulation of a person to determine a marker that allows one to identify these meaning strategies. The battery of tests included: the author's private semantic differential, including nine scales of personality properties, "Test of life-sense orientations" (by D. A. Leontiev), test "Who Am I?" (by M. Kuhn), "Multiple intelligence test" (by G. Gardner), "Test of frustration tolerance" (by S. Rosenzweig), "Questionnaire of personality reflection" (by I. A. Stetsenko). An empirical sample (n = 145) found that a stable positive statistically significant correlation (p≤.05) exists only between the indicators of nine developed scales of personal properties and the indicator "Meaningfulness of life" in the "Test of life-sense orientations" by D.A. Leontiev. This indicator "Meaning-fulness of life" can be used as an indicator marker of polar strategies of meaning formation: adaptive and developmental. Its use contributes to a more effective study of the processes of meaning formation and reduces the laboriousness of diagnostic procedures.

The article presents the results of an empirical study on models of Internet behavior of humanitarian students, taking into account their gender characteristics. The relevance of this study is determined by the active inclusion of modern students in the Internet space. The lack of studies on the problem of Internet behavior in the student community led to the need for empirical research. As an empirical object of research, we choose humanities faculties students of universities in Rostov-on-Don and the Rostov region in the amount of 60 people, including 28 young men and 32 young women. The psychological profiles of students' Internet behavior were studied, differences in the used models of Internet behavior in male and female samples were revealed. The features of Internet behavior are shown, indicating the fact that the student environment is dominated by entertainment and leisure activities in the use of Internet resources. It was revealed that the behavior of girls is predominant, defined as information surfing with a longer stay in the Internet space, boys have a shorter stay («Quickies» and «Single Missions») aimed at solving a specific problem.