PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS INFLUENCING PERSONAL AUTONOMY AS A FACTOR OF PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING

Address for correspondence, e-mail: editpsychas@gmail.com Copyright: © Galina Chaika This is an Open Access journal, all articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. ABSTRACT

as concerned about the expectations and evaluations of others, who relies on judgements of others to make important decisions and conforms to social pressures to think and act in certain ways (Seifert, 2005).
The purpose of this article is to determine the psychological factors contributing to development and formation of personal autonomy as it understood in the theory of psychological well-being. The research subject is personal autonomy as a psychological well-being factor. The research object is psychological factors influencing personal autonomy.
Status of problem research. According to C. Ryff, personal autonomy referred to the ability to resist social pressures to think or act in certain ways. An autonomous individual did not look to others for approval, but evaluates him/herself by personal standards; such individual is no longer cling to the collective fears, beliefs, and laws of the mass. Personal autonomy can be a criterion of mental health. From this perspective, autonomy referred to selfdetermination, independence, and the regulation of behaviour from within. Within this approach personal autonomy can be regarded as one of the final stages of development (Ryff , 1989).
The following systematization of ideas about 'autonomy" is made by D.O. Leontev (2007): a) separation of a person from the surrounding (emancipation); b) a personal trait; c) a basic need, a driving force, manifested at all stages of development; d) a "self-law" (fulfilment of the right to one's own life principles and value system).
According to E. Berne (2002), true personal autonomy is the manifestation or restoration of three abilities: awareness, spontaneity, sincerity.
Manifestations of personal autonomy should be distinguished from blind following of personal internal impulses or desires, which does not always lead to a positive for personal development result. Most definitely, such delineation is defined by V. Frankl (1990), who distinguished "a freedom from" and "a freedom for" and emphasized inextricable links between freedom and responsibility. Instead of thinking of individual autonomy as "freedom from" the governance of others, it is more appropriate to understand it in a positive way as self-government or self-determination (Young, 1986).
M.M. Pavlyuk (2015) views autonomy an integrative personal characteristics associated with such structures as self-concept, identity, motivations, the ability to choose, etc. O.A. Sergeeva (2007) notes that high personal autonomy is characterized by genuine interest in performed activities, initiative, flexibility of thinking and creativity, orientation on satisfaction from a performed activity; low personal autonomy is characterized by the desire to avoid failures and feelings of guilt, and the desire to receive an external praise and social approval. The level of personal autonomy, as well as the need for autonomy, increases with personal development, with the growth of faith in oneself, own powers and intellectual abilities, and faith in own ability to overcome difficulties and stresses faced during life (Нартова-Бочавер, 2005).
Based on the foregoing, we believe that it will be interesting and relevant to compare personal autonomy with such personal characteristics as: meaning in life, selfattitude, psychological hardiness, self-actualization.

Research methods and the researched sample.
Ryff's Scales of Psychological Well-being was used to determine autonomy of the studied respondents (Ryff, 1995). To determine the psychological factors affecting autonomy, we used the following tests: the Test of Meaningful Life Orientation of D.L. Leontev, which is the adapted version of Purpose-in-Life Test of James Krambo and Leonard Maholik (Leontev, 1992); Test-Questionnaire of Self-Attitude of V.V. Stolyn, S.R. Panteleyev (Stolyn, Panteleyev, 1988); S. Maddi's Hardiness Scale in adaptation of D.A. Leontiev, Ye.I. Raskasova (Leontev, Rasskazova, 2006 ), the Self-Actualization Test (CAT), which represents the adaptation of Shostrom's Personal Orientation Inventory (Aleshina et al., 1995).
In total, 150 respondents -students of Kyiv universities, age of 18 21 years, participated in the research.  Table 2 present somewhat stronger correlations between personal autonomy and an individual's self attitude. This is especially true for self-respect and selfassurance, these indicators reveal an individual's belief in his/her own strengths, abilities, energy, independence, in his/her ability to control own life and be self-consistent, self -understanding; they show an individual's attitude towards him/herself as a confident, independent, strong-willed and reliable person who knows that he/she has something to be respected.
There is statistically significant correlation only between personal autonomy and the "Control" indicator of Maddi's Hardiness Survey, and its value is average. According to S.Maddi, control involves struggling to have influence going on around oneself, rather that sinking into passivity and powerlessness (Maddi, 2002).
As Table 4 illustrate, there are several indicators of self-actualisation that correlate with psychological autonomy. Self-regard and self-acceptance, by their psychological meaning, are close to self-respect and self-assurance, exa-  Tables 5-7 (only indicators with significant differences for means at the examined groups are shown, equality of variances is not assumed).
The results presented in the Table 5 show that the Note: see note to Table 1   Table 4 Correlations between personal autonomy and the indicators of the Self-Actualization Test with those of the respondents of the groups 1 and 2 (tables 6 and 7).
The results presented in the Table 6   which an individual is independent and self-supportive; low values mean that the individual tends to be dependent.

Discussion.
As we can see from the performed correlative analysis and t-tests for independent samples, there are some personal characteristics that are related with personal autonomy in a linear pattern (the higher these characteristics are, the higher personal autonomy is). All of them are related to an individual's attitude to him/herself: auto-sympathy, expected attitude of others, self-assurance, self-acceptance, self-regard and acceptance of aggression, so they measure affirmation of self because of worth, ac-  Our results correspond with these finding partially, only for people with average and low autonomy. There are no differences in means for hardiness components of the respondents with average and high autonomy. We can say that good psychological hardiness is a necessary but insufficient requirement for high psychological autonomy. Psychological hardiness creates a basis for autonomy but cannot stipulate its further development at attainment of some level.
Which personal characteristics can support namely Conclusions. The analysed empirical study leads us to the following conclusion: Personal autonomy can be described as an individual's self-determination and independence, his/her ability to resist social pressures to think and act in certain ways, to regulate behaviour from within and to evaluate self by personal standards. Different personal characteristics influence an individual's personal autonomy depending on its level.
The self-attitude characteristics are in line with personal autonomy; this means that the higher these characteristics are, the higher personal autonomy is. In other words, if an individual believes in his/her own strengths, abilities, energy, independence, in his/her ability to control own life and be self-consistent, self-understanding, if an individual think on him/herself as a confident, independent, strong-willed and reliable person who knows that he/she has something to be respected, he/she also regard him/ herself as an autonomous person to the same degree.