Educational Strategy for Personal Safety in Ukraine: A Neurosocial Approach to Using Reflexes and Acquired Competencies

Abstract

This article analyzes current approaches to developing safety competencies and instant response skills in future social workers. It offers new didactic conditions and evaluates their effectiveness within Ukraine’s higher education institutions. The article aims to verify updated teaching methods based on the simulation of stressful and neutral situations. These methods influence students’ self-regulation and motivation to follow a personalized educational path. The article also compares Ukrainian practices with foreign theories related to psychological safety. This comparison helps to identify innovative trends in the interpretation of psychological safety. These trends relate specifically to how personal freedom is understood, how individuals define the boundaries of their psychological space, and how future social workers perceive and experience both immediate and long-term threats. To achieve this, the authors employ an interdisciplinary methodology. This includes subject-typological analysis of existing educational and neuroscientific theories, extrapolating neurophysiological principles to the educational process, and modelling based on newly proposed educational conditions. These models were tested using a quasi-experiment in a Ukrainian university. The evaluation was conducted using statistical analysis and qualitative discussion of results. Data were collected using several methods. These included student self-assessments and measurements of emotional intelligence to capture immediate stress responses. Additionally, experts observed students’ educational trajectories. Self-education practices were also analyzed, such as keeping reflective journals and refining individual danger-response protocols. Theoretical methods include subject analysis, as well as typological and comparative analysis of existing theories. The article also applies the extrapolation of neuroscientific approaches to the didactic context of higher education. Experimental methods involve the modelling of educational conditions based on the prior theoretical analysis. These models were verified through student self-observation, expert observation from external specialists, and statistical generalization of the collected assessments. The quasi-experiment demonstrated several key findings. First, it revealed the high effectiveness of reactive techniques for stress and anger perception, such as simulation training with limited reaction time. Second, the study found strong motivational responses to training sequences designed with neuro-reflexive principles. Finally, the experiment showed moderate effectiveness of strategies focused solely on cognitive knowledge acquisition.