HOW VALUE ORIENTATIONS OF STUDENTS CAN PREDICT THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THEIR SOCIAL COGNITION? Galina Kozhukhar 1 , Alla Belousova 2 1 Moscow State University of Psychology and Education (RUSSIAN FEDERATION) 2 Don State Technical University (RUSSIAN FEDERATION) Abstract The issues associated with the value sphere of personality are the most important in study of person and society as a whole, and studying at university is an important stage in the development of personality of young people, in the formation, stabilization, transformation of their value system. The influence of value orientations on social cognition of university students is still understudied. Therefore, the main issue of study was to identify how value orientations allow to predict the perception and understanding by students of the people around them. We used the following methods: method of diagnosing the real structure of personality's value orientations, Osgood’s Semantic Differential, Leary's "Interpersonal diagnosis of personality". Students had to evaluate themselves when studying the value orientations. The instruction was changed for Semantic Differential and Leary’s test: students were asked to evaluate how they perceive groupmates from their inner circle, with whom they study at university. SPSS Statistics 23, Methods of Descriptive Statistics and Automatic Linear Modeling for statistical data processing were used. The sample involved 126 students from Moscow universities, aged from 19 to 27, with 83% of girls among them. The results of descriptive statistics made it possible to determine the significance of value orientations for students: value of Altruism (M = 4.41) was in the first place, and value of Social Activity (M = 2.21) – in the last place. We described different types of value models that allowed to predict evaluation of other people and their interpersonal relations. As the main limitation of study, we consider the fact that subjects had to evaluate the qualities of personality and type of interpersonal relations of not specific groupmates, but some kind of collective image of their inner circle. The results of this study can form the basis for development of programs for socio-psychological training aimed at optimizing the processes of social perception on the basis of structural-content characteristics of value system of university students. Keywords: value orientation, evaluation of Other, interpersonal relations, student. 1 INTRODUCTION The issues associated with the value sphere of personality are the most important in study of person and society as a whole, and studying at university is an important stage in the development of personality of young people, in the formation, stabilization, transformation of their value system. The significance of values in a person's life is enormous. According to Schwartz, values, on the one hand, regulate the expression of personal interests and characteristics, on the other hand, they regulate the relationship of person with society and how these relationships affect the meeting of the needs and interests of all communicators. Values, as Schwarz points out, determine the behavior of a person, and in different ways, depending on which of the values are dominant. Based on this, he singled out 10 motivationally and goal-oriented types, each is characterized by a certain type of motivation and type of goals that correspond to it [1]. When considering the concepts "value" and "value orientation", D.A. Leontiev singled out three forms of the existence of values: social ideals, objective embodiment of these ideals and motivational structures of the personality, that are driving it to the actual embodiment of these ideals. Thus, following D.A. Leontiev, we will understand value orientations as the conscious representations of the subject about one’s own values [2]. Value orientations are understood by Bubnova and Sytin as a result of the reflection of social relations and system-forming factor of the personality. Values act as significant objects and phenomena of the surrounding reality, including social relations, for the personality. The very system of value orientations has a complex structure, which includes the most generalized, abstract values; values-ideals; values- personality qualities; real value orientations [3]. Proceedings of EDULEARN17 Conference 3rd-5th July 2017, Barcelona, Spain ISBN: 978-84-697-3777-4 5791