Special psychology. Methods and methods of research.

Special psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with the study of the special conditions of childhood and adolescence under the influence of certain groups of factors. Such conditions are manifested in the slowed or expressed peculiar psychosocial development of the child, which significantly complicates his socio-psychological adaptation, self-education and subsequent professional definition.

Special psychology deals with the study of various variants of the pathology of mental development and the problems of abnormal development of the psyche. Special attention is paid to the study of individual characteristics of mentally retarded children, with lesions of the cerebral cortex and the violation of the analyzer (hearing, speech). It has been reliably studied that the primary defect causes significant secondary changes, for example deafness, can cause changes in mental development, reorganization of life position, perception, thinking, relationships with others. Based on the data of special psychology, special training programs are created for people with developmental anomalies. The main task that special psychology sets itself is the formation of an adequate personality through the use of special methods and methods of education and training, as a result of which there is a restructuring and replacement of the impaired functions.

The object of special psychology is a person with developmental disabilities, and its tasks are to study the features and patterns of the mental development of people with various psychological and physical abnormalities in the conditions of correctional training. Special psychology has several specific areas that determine its activities. Surpsychology studies the psychology of the deaf and hard of hearing people, typhlopsychology studies the psychology and behavior of blind and visually impaired people, oligophrenic psychology studies the psychology of mentally retarded people, and logpsychology is designed to help people with speech disorders. This direction, like the psychology of the view, is of particular importance to people even with the slightest disturbance, since it represents almost the only way to adapt them to the outside world.

Special psychology, together with special pedagogy, are the main components of the complex scientific discipline - defectology, which studies the developmental features of children with mental and physical disabilities and their subsequent training and upbringing. Special psychology has special special methods of research, most often it uses:

• Group and individual laboratory psychological experiments . They represent an active intervention of the researcher in the life of the ward with the purpose of creating conditions that reveal any psychological regularity.
• Observation . Observation is the purposeful perception of the ward.
• Study of the products of activity. Under this influence is meant the analysis of letters, hand-made articles or children's drawings.
• Questioning. The tasks in this version of the study are presented in the form of questions.
• Projective methods. Designed to diagnose personality.
• Educational experiments . They are natural experiments characterized by a purposeful formation of psychological processes.
• Conditionally reflex methods .

Each of these techniques is used in special psychology for specific purposes, taking into account external factors and individual characteristics of a person. They are quite in demand among people suffering from various physical and mental disabilities. Like the psychology of the view, special psychology is now rising to a whole new level. Who knows, maybe in the near future thanks to it, people with mental and physical disabilities will become full members of our society.