Article presents the results of the social and psychological monitoring of union members of four high schools of Moscow, conducted in March and June 2016 on a sample of 419 people: 200 students and 219 teachers. The present part of the article discloses the motives of students’ membership in the university union; the main directions of the university union activities are also outlined. Among the main motives there are: the realization of social life activity, assistance, support and protection of the union members’ rights; personal and professional growth; participating in cultural enlightening, sport events and health improvement. Reasons for students’ lack of interest when joining the union are as follows: lack of understanding of the organization functions, unwillingness to pay fees, low credibility of the trade union organization, certitude in ability to protect own rights by themselves. The students consider greater awareness about the activities of the trade union committee to be one of the terms of increasing university union membership. Besides, the increase of trade union’s activities and of consciousness levels are the other important terms.

The article is devoted to the study of the representations of poverty and wealth at the stage of the primary economic socialization. It is shown that the development of the representations of poverty and wealth at different age stages is uneven. The content of the representations of poverty has a greater variability than the representations of wealth. The way children and teenagers understand poverty as a negative phenomenon indicate social relevance of poverty. The social and psychological factors of the development of poverty and wealth representations is analyzed.

Social and socio-psychological functions of mass media within the context of media consumption and media inclusion are discussed. The results of researching three groups of Russian society (journalists, teachers and students) demonstrate there is an idea about mass media shared by all groups. It has been shown that the key functions of traditional mass media as reflected in the three groups’ representations are informational and cultural-educational. The lack of educational programs and issues and abundance of low quality information has been revealed. Some differences in the three groups’ members’ representations have been detected.

The article describes mentoring in educating sphere of orphans and children left without parental care. For 8 years a long-term mentoring took place under the guidance and support of professional psychologists. Social role of mentoring for motivating children in difficult life situations to get education has been revealed. Besides, it contributes to self-esteem and selfconfidence; it is also important for motivating children to study and get education. Mentoring children in difficult life situations has resulted in their ability to finish school, get professional education and find work.

This paper presents a conceptual approach to the study of representations on a competitive employee. The central concept of this approach is the category of "social representations". It is shown that the notions of competitiveness arise from the views about the necessity of having such quality as competitiveness, the ideas of a competitive employee’s personality and his activities. It is identified that competitiveness is an integral part of the employment relationship. Besides, competitiveness of a worker is to a greater degree conditioned by his personal qualities and characteristics of his activities.

The article presents the comparison of managers’ creativity and programmer engineers’ one. The comparative analysis of creativity showed that there are certain differences between the two groups: of managers and programmer engineers. In each of the studied groups the criteria of creativity, which may indicate creative abilities of the group, are marked. On the whole, the criteria of managers’ creativity have higher rates than of the programmer engineers’ ones. This research showed that it is necessary to develop creativity while educating both programmers and managers.

The article scrutinizes the problems of differential psychophysiology in modern human study. The author studies the historical aspect of the problem; and expresses her personal attitude to the necessity of examining differential psychology through the standpoint of modern psychologists. Differential psychophysiology together with its “adjacent” branches - differential psychology, genetic psychophysiology, psychogenetics, psychology of holistic individuality, differential acmeology - is still mistakenly accepted by many scientists as physiology which has no relation to fundamental laws of psychology. As a result, the sphere of individual differences, and of individuality as a whole, has become the Cinderella of psychology. Modern width of the works studied definitely proves that the problems of individuality peculiarities are undoubtedly important for science and practice. Besides, the differential-physiological aspect of studying continuously arising problems is also important.

The article is devoted to the empirical research of the effectiveness of collective intellectual activities on the example of group solving of creative tasks. A comprehensive review of cognitive abilities and features of interpersonal interaction between the participants of the group activities enabled to reveal a number of factors that lead to the effectiveness of collective intellectual activities: the presence in the group of participants with atypical features of interpersonal interaction, the average level of discursive abilities and the enhanced level of creativity.