Educational Program in Psychology as a Factor of Personality Self-Regulation Development

Processes of personality development include many factors, both external and internal. Coping with complex life events or living a specific life experience involves various strategies of self-control and self-regulation. In this paper, we are interested in whether immersion in the psychological education environment can trigger these mechanisms and affect the dynamics of development of personality maturity among students. Jane Loevinger's Ego Development Theory (1976) is the basic one in the work. According to the theory, the development of personality maturity continues throughout life despite age. This has been confirmed by some studies, provided that a person is faced with certain specific life experiences that are meaningful, emotionally engaging, and related to interpersonal interactions. This research examines the extent to which the experience of passing a psychological education program can affect the trajectory of the personality maturity of students. It is known that the training of specialists of this type has its own unique conditions. This work allows us to find out whether the passage of an educational program of a psychological profile can become a sufficiently specific life experience that can affect the trajectories of personality processes in such students. The results of this study show us that the trends in the processes of personality development among psychology students are different from the patterns of students who pass non-psychological educational programs. The factor of the level of ego development allows us to examine the work and direction of functioning of various personality resources more precisely . Self-regulation of psychologists is directed at the internal personality processes of the individual, primarily related to self-reflection. And non-psychologists tend to turn to the outside world, in search of resources to maintain personality self-regulation. The results of the study suggest that immersion in the psychological education environment acts as a life situation that takes the existing structures of the individual out of balance, involving new mechanisms of self-regulation and provoking it to change the intrapersonal structure.