Career orientation, exercise addiction, and analogue music listening
Table of contents
- Career orientation trends in the 21st century
- Online education experiences of university lecturers
- A new perspective on emotion comprehension: its development and opportunities for development
- Technostress: the workplace challenge of the digital era
- Communication in the ICU: an unintended nocebo effect?
- The renaissance of analogue music listening in Hungary
- The relationship between exercise addiction and passion in individualist and collectivist countries
Career orientation trends in the 21st century
The frameworks of postmodern society, the labour market, and career are fluid. Career choices are usually not made for life. Some modern authors even argue that the very notion of “career” may be ripe for discarding. The theories of career choice and career planning that were created for the world of conventional wage labour are now outdated; therefore we need to reinterpret the notions of modern career planning and career paths. This theoretical article outlines the factors surrounding career development in the 21st century. It examines four school founders and their career theories that can help us to rethink the conceptual framework of modern domestic career orientation.
Online education experiences of university lecturers
This study explores the nature and experiences of ELTE PPK lecturers regarding participation in online mentoring, as well as how participants overcome the challenges of transitioning to online education while developing their skills in a supportive environment. The interviews, conducted with participants from three organisational levels, were examined by the authors using thematic content analysis based on Kahn’s concept of “holding environment”. The results showed initial difficulties in establishing safety in the online space, but participants went on to achieve a relative balance in the coordinated and personalised mentoring network. Empathic recognition proved to be crucial, and the structured leadership and coordination also facilitated the operation of the network. The paper describes the complex dynamics and adaptive strategies of online mentoring and the transformation of the mentoring ecosystem into a holding environment.
A new perspective on emotion comprehension: its development and opportunities for development
In their methodological study, Orsolya Német, Szilvia Fodor and Anikó Zsolnai set out to introduce the concept of emotion comprehension and to compare it with similar concepts from different disciplines in a novel way. The authors present the development of emotion comprehension, which is Pons and Harris’s defining theory, and situate this novel concept within the framework of socio-emotional learning. The study provides an insight into a comprehensive measurement tool for emotion comprehension that has hitherto been missing, the TEC test, which can be an effective tool for evaluating the impact of developmental interventions. The second part of the paper presents and analyses international intervention programmes that have used the TEC test. In addition to these foreign programmes, further insights are provided into the framework of the domestically developed reflective story therapy, which offers a new method for developing emotion comprehension.
Technostress: the workplace challenge of the digital era
Technostress – the stress associated with using digital tools – is one of the hidden dangers of modern workplaces. This adaptation disorder can take various forms, such as techno-overload, invasion of privacy (techno-invasion), the feeling of techno-complexity, techno-uncertainty, or the fear of replacing tools (techno-insecurity). Research shows that technostress not only threatens workers’ mental health but can also cause organisational problems. The present study, involving more than 450 office workers, revealed that technostress is related to psychosocial factors at the workplace. The results show that technostress can negatively affect, for instance, work-family balance, relationships with managers, and job satisfaction. These findings emphasise the responsibility of managers to support employees during the digital transformation so that the benefits of technology do not become disadvantages.
Communication in the ICU: an unintended nocebo effect?
The study presents the results of a research conducted in collaboration with Mayo Clinic’s Department of Critical Care, which investigated the inadvertent effects of medical communication. The aim of the research was to identify medical terms that may have an adverse emotional impact on patients in critical condition. Researchers asked members of the critical care team to complete an anonymous survey and collected phrases and idioms that may negatively affect the emotional state of the patients.
Out of the 1600 healthcare providers surveyed, 265 participants provided 1379 examples, which the authors grouped into five categories: medical jargon, negative suggestions, hyperboles, homonyms, and metaphors/similes. The results show that these potentially harmful language elements are commonplace in the practice of medical care. The research highlights the need to pay significantly more attention to such nocebo effects in medical care than is currently the case.
The renaissance of analogue music listening in Hungary
Since the 2010s, a strange mania for listening to music at home has unfolded both worldwide and in Hungary: analogue music listening and playback devices (vinyl record players, cassette decks) are popular again. The aim of this research is to explore why listening to analogue music is more enjoyable for Hungarian consumers, what motivations drive them towards choosing analogue music contents, how collecting and buying–selling appears, and whether it is a social or an individual recreational activity.
Among the results, the analogue sound is highlighted, which is perceived as more detailed, natural, and beautiful compared to the artificial sound of digital music. For those who have been using analogue systems for decades, nostalgia also appears as a positive emotional effect, but this is preceded by experiences by the physical nature of analogue carriers. Hungarian analogue music consumers are mostly middle-aged or older and listen to music less often with others. The places of purchase and exchange of analogue music content are both online and offline.
The relationship between exercise addiction and passion in individualist and collectivist countries
While the risk of exercise addiction (REA) sharing a large proportion of variance with passion is rarely researched in collectivist nations, recent research evidence suggests that exercisers in these societies might exhibit greater REA than those in individualist countries. Using an online cross-sectional survey, this study examined the differences in REA, obsessive passion (OP), and harmonious passion (HP) between Hungary, an individualist country, and India, the world’s largest collectivist society. Criteria for participation, which included age 18 or over and exercising at least four times per week, were met by 987 participants, with a female majority. The prevalence of REA was greater among Indian (21.86%) than Hungarian (5.38%) exercisers. Hungarians scored higher on HP and lower on REA than their Indian counterparts. Obsessive passion was a significant predictor of REA in both nations, but HP contributed to variance in REA only in Indian exercisers. These results have implications for the field, suggesting that generalising research results on REA, OP, and HP may be unreliable because gender and cultural factors affect these measures. Thus, passion and exercise addiction should be examined in a cultural context.