ABSTRACT
The present study aimed to broaden the knowledge about the personal and parental factors associated with teenagers' efforts to actively engage in the developmental task of vocational preparation. We investigated the associations between parental career-related behaviors (i.e., parental support, interference, and lack of engagement), adolescents' career exploration, and the moderating role of dispositional optimism. Our sample was formed by 441 Romanian teenagers (58 % males, M = 14.17, SD = 1.05). The results suggested that ado-lescents experiencing a low level of parental support reported a low level of career exploration, regardless of the level of dispositional optimism. Conversely, when the level of parental support was high, participants reported a higher level of career exploration when they also reported a high level of dispositional optimism. We discuss the importance of examining individual characteristics in conjunction with ecological factors related to adolescents' environments when understanding career exploration.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has impacted the health and welfare of people globally. Given the fundamental role of sleep in health and wellbeing, it is important to study the impact of Covid-19 on sleep quality, dream content and emotionality. This has not been studied among Indian population. The present study was carried out to understand the state of sleep quality, dream contents and the relation between sleep quality and emotionality in people during the Covid-19. Based on previous studies, we expected to find differences among individuals based on how much they were affected by Covid-19, which may be because of pandemic-related stressors (like altered family dynamics, economic stability, etc.). We used Mannheim Dream questionnaire (MADRE), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). We used robust statistics and resampling-based estimates to quantify differences and associations for hypothesis testing. The findings indicate that during pandemic, sleep quality deteriorated with increase in negative affect and improved with increase in positive affect. Sleep quality also deteriorates with an increase in the intensity of emotionally charged dreams. Furthermore, correlation analysis revealed a negative relationship between age and negative affect (NA) suggesting that the younger the age, higher the negative affective state. Subjects who reported to be Covid-19 affected had an increased frequency of nightmares and were more distressed by nightmares, compared to those reporting not affected. This supports the notion that sleep, dreams, and affective states were disrupted during the pandemic. Subjects infected with Covid-19 had dreams of relatives or friends suffering from coronavirus and this shows the strong effect of the pandemic on the dream contents. Our study highlights the impact of psychological stress on human sleep, and emotionality. According to the study findings, we suggest that monitoring sleep, dreams, and emotions may help in developing effective interventions to restore sleep quality, prevent sleep disorders, and manage affective behaviour in pandemic like situations. © 2023, International Journal of Dream Research. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The dynamics of search queries in large random samples may reflect both the reaction of the population to the statements of power subjects, and the presence of certain mechanisms of emotional self-regulation. Objective(s): Studying the dynamics of information search queries in the situation of experiencing an objective global threat-the spread of COVID-19. Method(s): Quantitative methods of the Data Mining class were used for data collection. Qualitative methods of the Data Mining class and contextual analysis were used for data analysis. Search queries related to COVID-19 and the introduction of self-isolation were analyzed: 5 million queries were randomly selected. Result(s): The number of information requests on the topic of the pandemic increased sharply after V. Putin's first address, and then steadily decreased, but the overall picture of the content dynamics of search queries, depending on official statements of the authorities, was not observed;requests about the current level of morbidity are constantly presented to the greatest extent, and to the minimum-about the possibilities of psychological assistance and the state of the Russian economy. During the whole time of the study the contents of the Internet search shifted towards positive emotional information. Conclusion(s): . To the maximum extent, the relationship between the experience of a pandemic and self-isolation with the nature of search queries manifests itself at the initial stages and tends to decrease in the future. The dynamics of the content of requests is ambiguously related to official statements of power subjects, influenced by the effect of counter-regulation.
ABSTRACT
With the incidence of the Covid-19 pandemic, institutions have adopted online learning as the main lesson delivery channel. A common criticism of online learning is that sensing of learners' affective states such as engagement is lacking which degrades the quality of teaching. In this study, we propose automatic sensing of learners' affective states in an online setting with web cameras capturing their facial landmarks and head poses. We postulate that the sparsely connected facial landmarks can be modelled using a Graph Neural Network. Using the publicly available in the wild DAiSEE dataset, we modelled both the spatial and temporal dimensions of the facial videos with a deep learning architecture consisting of Graph Attention Networks and Gated Recurrent Units. The ablation study confirmed that the differencing of consecutive frames of facial landmarks and the addition of head poses enhance the detection performance. The results further demonstrated that the model performed well in comparison with other models and more importantly, is suited for implementation on mobile devices with its low computational requirements.
ABSTRACT
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, as the user-base of online synchronous communication systems skyrocketed, the shortcomings of synchronous online learning systems became more visible. Any attempt to overcome these shortcomings should be considered worthwhile due to the magnitude of potential impact. Improving the quality and addressing the shortcomings of online education is more important than ever. The goal of this multidisciplinary study that lies in the intersection of the fields of Education Science and Computer Science is to address a number of challenges of online education by incorporating AI. This study focuses on developing methods and means to ethically collect and use non-verbal cues of participants of online classrooms to assist teachers, students, and course coordinators by providing real-time and after-the-fact feedback of the students’ learning-centered affective states. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
ABSTRACT
Our aim is to analyze the extent to which the psychosocial aspects can characterize the affective states of the teachers, administrative staff, and undergraduate and postgraduate students during the quarantine. A questionnaire was answered by 1,328 people from the community of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Spain. The survey was partially designed ad hoc, collecting indicators related to sociodemographic variables, the impact of COVID on the subjects or in their personal context, the psychosocial context of coexistence and perceived social support, characteristics related to the physical context during the quarantine, and labor conditions. Additionally, it included two validated instruments: the Survey Work-Home Interaction-Nijmegen for Spanish Speaking Countries (SWING-SSC) validated in Spanish and PANAS, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. Classification and Regression Trees (CART) were performed to identify which variables better characterize the participants' level of positive and negative affective states. Results according to groups showed that students are the ones who have suffered the most as a result of this situation (temporary employment regulation, higher scores in negative work-home and home-work interaction, lower scores in positive home-work interaction, and negative effects of teleworking). Additionally, they reported a higher mean score in interpersonal conflict and worse scores with regard to negative affective states. Based on sex, women were the ones whose environment was shown to be more frequently affected by the pandemic and who exhibited more negative effects of teleworking. In general terms, participants with the highest scores in negative affective states were those who perceived an increase in conflict and a high negative effect from work spilling over into their personal lives. On the contrary, participants with the highest levels of positive affective states were those with medium to low levels of negative home-work interaction, over 42.5 years old, and with medium to high levels of positive work-home interaction. Our results aim to help higher education to reflect on the need to adapt to this new reality, since the institutions that keep pace with evolving trends will be able to better attract, retain, and engage all the members of the university community in the years ahead.
ABSTRACT
The aim of the study was to identify coherence, hope for success and coping strategies as predictors of mood among this year's Olympians in the context of coronavirus events. The relationships between the above variables and the mood of athletes were analysed. The study group consisted of 57 athletes - women (29) and men (28) between 18 and 39 years of age - representing various sports disciplines who were preparing for the Tokyo Olympics. The research was conducted in the period of April 7-28, 2020 during the first threat of COVID-19 pandemic, following the decision to move the Summer Olympics to the year 2021. It was time of the greatest national restrictions and information about the postponement of the games had been received. As a result of the step regression analysis, three predictors of vigour were established: sense of meaningfulness, coping with stress through positive reframing, and not using the self-blaming strategy. A positive predictor of anger was the use of substances. Confusion was predicted based on the frequency of behavioral disengagement. Behavioral disengagement predicted the severity of depression. Predictors of fatigue were the sense of meaningfulness, and the strategies of positive reframing and self-blaming. The results obtained emphasize the importance of positive reframing as a factor contributing to maintaining a positive mood state. In contrast, behavioral disengagement and self-blaming were strategies that lowered the mood of elite athletes. The results confirm the importance of factors included in the salutogenic model (sense of coherence, coping strategies) as predictors of athletes' mood during a pandemic.