Gladkih, Natalia Yu.

Psychosemantic approach is most in demand when it comes to research collective representations, allowing to identify the underlying attitudes and stereotypes that are poorly reflected upon, or hidden because of social undesirability, and therefore difficult to diagnose. Political leaders’ perception is just such an example. The article deals with a number of images of contemporary political leaders and historical figures who have played at one time a significant role in world politics in the student audience perceptions of South Korea. Psychosemantic author’s technique “The image of a political leader” was used to obtain empirical data. 107 subjects (females and males) took part in the survey. The study included the construction of multi-dimensional semantic spaces, projecting the operational model of categorical perception structures of political leaders. For data analysis methods of multivariate statistics were used (principal component analysis and discriminant analysis).