In the late 1980s, amid Gorbachev’s perestroika, the emergence of new political parties and movements prompted Viktor Petrenko an idea of constructing a semantic space for political parties to gain insights into the trajectory of unfolding events. Olga Valentinovna Mitina, a longstanding colleague and collaborator in numerous subsequent studies, provided invaluable support as his assistant and co-author.

Figure 1. Example of a semantic space depicting the dynamics of role positions during hypnotherapy in drug rehab patients, with the factors “General Well-Being” <-> “Adversity” and “Orderly living” <-> “Disorderly living (readiness for change)”

Methodologically, the study mirrored gender studies, albeit with political parties (a total of 28 entities) as the subjects of examination. The researchers meticulously analyzed an extensive corpus of newspapers, party programs, and speeches delivered by political leaders, extracting judgments that were subsequently transcribed into scales. Among the salient issues probed were questions that reflected the prevailing worldview of that era, such as “Can individuals possess private property?” “Should the republics maintain their own armed forces?” and “Is religious freedom essential?” In total, 212 judgments were scrutinized.

The outcomes of the study exhibited a remarkable predictive capacity, as it successfully identified the strongest factions: Democrats being the most influential, followed by the Communists, and then the National Patriots. When Hakob Pogosovich Nazaretyan, an expert in evolutionary theory, political psychology, and cultural anthropology, and a friend of Viktor Petrenko, examined the results, he made an astonishing statement: “There’s a good chance that the Soviet Union will break up.” At the time, that suggestion appeared absurd. A pilot experiment was conducted in 1990, revealing that the dominant factor was the “acceptance” or “rejection” of Communist ideology. Then, in 1991, just before the collapse of the USSR, the most influential factor became the “preservation of the Soviet Union” vs a “Federation” or “Confederation of Independent Republics.”

Today, psychosemantics finds extensive application in ethnopsychology, studies of the perception of art (including paintings and feature films), and color perception (Yanshin, 2006). It is also employed in political psychology (Petrenko & Mitina, 2017), gender studies (Chebakova, 2010; Dambaeva, 2017), various clinical and psychological investigations, studies on the worldview of specific social and age groups, assessment of the effectiveness of commercial and social advertising (Gladkikh, 2017; Kyshtymova, 2014; Kshenina, 2006; Teplova, 2016; Gladkikh & Vainer, 2018), and numerous other domains. A new promising area of exploration lies in finding and analyzing the methodological junctions between psychosemantics of consciousness and quantum physics (Petrenko & Suprun, 2017).

The Psychosemantic methods are also in studying the perception of political and socio-cultural issues, as they enable the identification of underlying attitudes and stereotypes that may remain concealed or hard to detect due to social undesirability (Petrenko, Gladkikh & Mitina, 2016; Gaivoronskaya, 2018). Moreover, these methods find use in investigating altered states of consciousness. For instance, V. F. Petrenko, together with V. V. Kucherenko, compared semantic spaces during hypnotherapy to observe the dynamics of changes in individuals’ worldview (Petrenko et al., 2006). It is safe to say that there are few areas of psychology left where one cannot find examples of the use of psychosemantic tools. The results obtained strongly advocate for the popularization of the method of constructing subjective semantic spaces for studying social representations.

In linguistic dictionaries, “semantics” is defined as the meaning conveyed by a sign, be it a symbol, word, text, or utterance in the broadest sense. It is a branch of linguistics that examines the semantic significance of language units. Psychosemantics, on the other hand, is a field of psychology that investigates the structure, formation, and functioning of an individual or collective subject’s system of meanings.

At the core of psychosemantics lies the “Subjective Semantic Space,” which represents a person’s categorization structure as a mathematical field. The coordinate axes within this space correspond to the inherent grounds of categorization, as shown in Figure 1 (Petrenko, Kucherenko & Vyalba, 2006).

The semantic space serves as a research tool that allows identifying semantic relationships between objects and analyzing their structure. The construction of a semantic space involves three key steps (Petrenko, 1982):

1. In the first stage, semantic connections between objects are analyzed using such methods as associative experiments and subjective scaling. This step results in the construction of a similarity matrix that encapsulates the internal structure of the semantic space.

2. In the second stage, the similarity matrix is subjected to mathematical processing to uncover the underlying factors or clusters. This typically entails using various techniques such as factor analysis, multivariate scaling, and cluster analysis. It is important to note that mathematical processing does not generate new content but allows for the presentation of raw data in a concise and well-structured format.