When trying to correlate the essence of changes in mental activity with these anomalies to the basic concepts of psychological science, there is also a wide variety of approaches. The designation of these deviations may relate to various, fairly general psychological categories. Thus, a fairly common variant is the characteristic of human behavior, which is expressed by the term "deviant behavior". Modifications of this term are definitions such as "deviant", "delinquent", "antisocial", "criminal", "suicidal", etc.
It should be emphasized that none of the listed definitions of deviant behavior can be considered as an indicator of the painful nature of these deviations. Social and medical criteria for evaluating behavior often do not coincide. A mentally healthy person can grossly violate social and legal norms, and, conversely, with pronounced signs of mental pathology, quite law-abiding, socially acceptable behavior can be observed. In many cases, unusual behaviors that differ from some average idea of the norm are associated with character or personality traits.
Depending on both the context of the discussion and the author's initial theoretical positions, the designations of various forms of behavior, actions and reactions of a person of a non-painful nature vary very widely.
"Although modern ethologists (ethology is the science of animal behavior) recognize the complexity of the problem of studying mental life, animal behavior, they still come to the conclusion: "It seems that as our knowledge of animal behavior increases, the differences between humans and animals begin to shrink" (McFarland D. Animal behavior. Psychobiology, ethology and evolution. – Moscow, 1988. – p. 440). At the same time, they are, of course, aware that animals do not have a language (in the human sense), there is no corresponding cultural world. However, there are also many similarities in animal and human behavior.
The idea of the hereditary nature of altruism, kindness, modesty and other moral qualities was especially actively defended in Russian science until recently by the famous geneticist V.P. Efroimson. In a number of his publications, he wrote that the ability to distinguish between good and evil is already inherent in the human genotype. But the ethical code of kindness and altruism can be drowned out by the environment and upbringing. "There is a lot of "animal" in human nature, but there is a lot of "human" in animals," wrote V. Efroimson (Efroimson V.P. Genetics of ethics and aesthetics. St. Petersburg, 1995. – p. 43).