Search Results (604)

Background/Objectives: Patient education (PE) is a key component in the management of chronic conditions, including living with an entero-urostomy. Exploring patients’ and caregivers’ experiences may inform the development of tailored educational interventions. This study aimed to explore the perceptions, experiences, and needs of adult oncology patients with entero-urostomies and their caregivers as part of the patient education process. Methods: A descriptive qualitative study was conducted at a single Italian cancer centre using two focus group sessions integrated with PE activities. Discussions were audio-recorded and analysed through thematic analysis following the framework described by Dawadi. NVivo was used to support data management and facilitate the assessment of data saturation. Results: A total of 28 participants (15 patients and 13 caregivers) were recruited. Three main themes emerged: translational patient education as a co-constructed educational process, time as a protective and regulatory resource in everyday stoma management and living with a stoma requires adaptation and meaning-making. The first theme describes a dynamic integration of clinical, peer, and relational knowledge co-constructed by nurses, patients, and caregivers. The second theme referred to the perception of time and care contexts, including telenursing, as protective spaces supporting anticipatory coping and daily life planning. The last theme captured the embodied and psychological adaptation to living with a stoma, characterised by heterogeneous processes of acceptance and meaning-making. Conclusions: PE emerges as a relational and interactive process that supports self-care, emotional adjustment, and quality of life. The concept of translational patient education, as part of the patient education process, offers a novel framework for integrating multiple forms of knowledge within educational practices, strengthening the person-centred nature of PE programmes. These findings support the development of tailored, person-centred PE interventions that incorporate the dynamic educational ecosystem involving patients, caregivers, and stoma care nurses. They also highlight the need for further research to validate this conceptual model across diverse settings and populations. Full article

While architectural visual features significantly influence human emotion, the spatiotemporal neuro-mechanisms underlying their interactive effects remain poorly under-researched. This study systematically decoupled the dynamics of indoor spatial perception by investigating the interactive impacts of color combination, color shape, and area proportion to find out the effects on participants’ emotion. By integrating high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG), specifically analyzing the N200, late positive potential (LPP), Frontal Alpha Asymmetry (FAA), and Beta bands with Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) ratings and Liking scores in immersive virtual indoor environments, data from 61 valid participants were analyzed. The results revealed a hierarchical neuro-affective processing structure: morphology dominated early cognitive processing, where curved geometries acted as a pre-attentive cognitive buffer, acting as a cognitive buffer by significantly attenuating the early-stage visual stress induced by angular, high-contrast configurations. Conversely, color combination primarily drove late-stage sustained environmental arousal, tracked by the LPP. Notably, area proportion demonstrated a significant amplification effect, significantly exacerbating pre-existing neuro-affective biases. Crucially, cross-modal triangulation revealed a selective inter-modal coupling: while sustained cortical activation (ΔLPP) significantly predicted subjective emotional arousal, early physiological buffering (ΔN200/ΔFAA) was functionally dissociated from subjective aesthetic preference (ΔLiking). This decoupling provides preliminary evidence consistent with a dual-system processing framework, suggesting that while curves may facilitate a preconscious biological safe baseline, ultimate aesthetic appreciation is likely subject to top-down cognitive over-riding. Ultimately, these findings transition indoor spatial color design from intuitive practice to evidence-based neuro-aesthetics, highlighting the critical role of morphological buffering and EEG metrics in optimizing human emotional well-being. Full article

Background/Objectives: Diabetes mellitus is associated with complex behavioral, psychosocial, and functional challenges that may influence disease burden and complication profiles. This study aimed to identify latent dimensions of diabetes self-management and health-related functioning and to evaluate their association with the type of diabetes-related complications. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 300 patients with type 2 diabetes, classified into microvascular and macrovascular complication groups. A questionnaire comprising DSMQ (diabetes self-management questionnaire) derived items, SF-36-derived items, and other questions was administered to all participants. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to identify latent dimensions related to self-management, emotional burden, dietary behavior, glycemic control challenges, glucose monitoring, and functional status. Composite scores were calculated for factors with acceptable internal consistency. Between-group comparisons, Spearman correlation analysis, and binary logistic regression models adjusted for age, sex, residence area, marital status, education, diabetes duration, and treatment type were applied. Results: Six latent factors were identified: Emotional Burden, Dietary Self-Management, Functional Limitations, Glycemic Control Challenges, Glucose Monitoring, and General Health Perception. However, only the factors demonstrating acceptable internal consistency were retained for subsequent analyses: Emotional Burden, Functional Limitations, and Glycemic Control Challenges. Functional Limitations showed the strongest association with complication type, with patients with macrovascular complications reporting greater functional impairment. After adjustment for potential confounders and correction for multiple comparisons, higher adherence to the recommended meal plan (DSMQ2) and greater functional limitations remained the principal differences between the complication groups. Functional Limitations Score remained independently associated with complication type in both unadjusted and adjusted logistic regression models. Conclusions: These cross-sectional findings support the integration of functional, psychosocial, and behavioral assessment into comprehensive diabetes care and highlight differences in patient-reported outcomes across complication groups. Full article

This study explores how university students experience conversational artificial intelligence (AI) in the era of generative AI from the perspectives of algorithmic intimacy, social connection, well-being, and autonomy, and identifies their subjective meaning structures. Specifically, it examines how university students perceive conversational AI in relation to emotional regulation, self-understanding, relational boundaries, and autonomy, and how these perceptions relate to intimacy and well-being. Unlike previous studies focused primarily on AI use and acceptance, this study analyses how students interpret their experiences with conversational AI and negotiate relational boundaries. Using Q methodology, we developed 40 Q statements from literature review and in-depth interviews. Fifty-six university students in South Korea with experience using conversational AI completed the Q-sorting process. A four-factor solution explained 55% of the total variance and yielded four distinct types: (1) Relationship-Negating Instrumentalists, (2) Selective Emotional Utilizers, (3) Reflective Distancers, and (4) Autonomy Defenders. Although none of the groups viewed AI as a complete substitute for human relationships, they differed in their acceptance of algorithmic intimacy, use of AI for emotional support and regulation, concerns about dependence, and efforts to protect autonomy. These findings suggest that conversational AI experiences involve negotiating intimacy and boundaries rather than producing uniformly positive or negative outcomes. This study complements variable-centred approaches by identifying distinct subjective meaning structures in university students’ human–AI relationship experiences. Full article

As digital media become deeply embedded in postgraduate students’ daily learning and social interactions, online narratives of supervisor–postgraduate relationships have emerged as a crucial means for them to express authentic experiences and seek emotional support. Adopting a sensemaking perspective, this study employs online ethnography and thematic analysis to investigate postgraduate students’ narratives of supervisor–postgraduate relationships on a Douban group. The findings reveal four core thematic dimensions of these online narratives: identity formation, emotional interaction, experience sharing, and social connection. These dimensions help postgraduate students clarify their self-perception, release emotions, acquire practical experience, and establish a sense of group belonging, particularly in contexts where institutional support is insufficient. Online narratives essentially serve as a compensatory self-help channel for postgraduate students to cope with real-world challenges. They highlight structural shortcomings in offline supervisory governance and offer theoretical and practical insights to optimize supervisor–postgraduate relationships in the digital age. Full article

This study examines the challenges facing intercultural competence education in higher education during times of intense conflict. Most of the intercultural competence programs in higher education are based on Western liberal multicultural logic that strives to build trust between groups in conflict to promote peacemaking. The common conception of trust is described as a developmental cognitive–emotional effort that is anchored in a reflective and multi-perspective calculation of events and procedures that require a willingness to give up parts of positions and standpoints. The process is supposed to be mediated by a professional and unbiased facilitator who creates a “dialogic space” based on self-reflection and perspective-taking of the “other”. Previous findings suggest that these programs were relatively efficient before the 7 October war broke out in Israel. Thus, a joint Palestinian and Jewish program that was conducted at a teacher training college after 7 October challenged these findings. Examining the discursive practices used by the participants during the meetings revealed that the basic liberal multicultural assumptions of the intercultural competence model were rejected by students from both groups. The students interpreted the model as a way to contextualize the term peace in a specific ideological–political context. Understanding peace as a concept with a layered meaning contradicts the intercultural competence model’s perception of it as a universal–humanistic–independent position. Thus, the findings further problematize the universal perception of intercultural competence models in order to adjust them to teacher trainees working outside the West during difficult times. Full article

Background: Depression is a major public health concern and remains a challenge despite traditional care approaches. This study sought to answer the following research question: how do participants in a program based on Permission Theory describe their perceptions of change related to the depressive experience? Methods: This exploratory and descriptive study employed a quantitative and qualitative approach, grounded in Bardin’s Content Analysis to analyze 23 spontaneous accounts from participants who reported experiences related to depression. Data were collected through self-reports voluntarily submitted by program participants through a routine administrative electronic form, characterizing a convenience sample. After thematic screening and manual verification of eligibility criteria, 23 accounts mentioning experiences related to depression were included in the analysis corpus. The participants evaluated their lives before and during the program. Results: The quantitative analysis showed an increase in self-reported scores of overall life evaluation during the program. Consistently, the qualitative accounts indicated that participants subjectively perceived changes in emotional, relational, and functional aspects of their everyday lives, including perceived changes in their depressive experience. Conclusions: These findings emphasize how participants interpret and describe changes in their emotional, relational, and functional lives, aspects that are often less visible in conventional mental health outcome research. These perceptions do not allow for inference of clinical effects or a causal relationship with program participation, reinforcing the need for controlled studies to investigate potential impacts on mental health outcomes. Full article

Game-based learning (GBL) has increasingly been recognized as a valuable approach for supporting student engagement, motivation, and skill development in educational settings. However, comparatively little research has examined analog gameplay within informal, co-curricular higher education environments. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this exploratory study examined students’ perceptions of their experiences at a university’s Academic Skills Centre’s (ASC) Game Café (not course-based), with particular attention to motivation, social engagement, and perceived academic skill development. Using a descriptive, cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 44 student participants through a researcher-developed survey consisting of Likert-scale and open-ended questions. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, while qualitative responses were thematically coded. Internal consistency analyses demonstrated acceptable to strong reliability across survey scales (Q6 α = 0.70; Q7 α = 0.89). Findings indicated that students perceived a consistent association between the Game Café and positive emotional experiences, collaboration, peer interaction, and the perceived development of transferable skills such as communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Participants also described the café as a low-pressure and socially supportive environment that fostered motivation and informal learning beyond the classroom. Overall, the findings suggest that analog, co-curricular game-based environments may support students’ perceived engagement, belonging, and learning within higher education contexts. Full article

This study relates to the growing recognition of the school–family relationship as a key factor in equity, inclusion, and educational success, highlighting the need to strengthen teacher education in this area. The aim was to design and content validate a specific instrument for identifying teachers’ training needs in relation to the promotion of this relationship. The EVANEFEF questionnaire was developed from a prior qualitative study and subsequently subjected to content validation by an expert panel of eleven specialists, followed by a pilot study. The final instrument, comprising 114 items on prior training and the self-assessment of competencies related to the school–family relationship, showed adequate content validity. The findings indicate that the questionnaire enables the assessment of teachers’ perceptions and the identification of training needs in key areas such as communicative, digital, socio-emotional, and multicultural competencies. In conclusion, EVANEFEF is a useful tool for guiding the design of teacher-training programmes that are more closely aligned with actual needs, thereby strengthening school–family collaboration and, ultimately, improving educational quality. Full article

Background/Objectives: Household food insecurity (FI) impacts child health and development. Children have distinct and unique experiences of FI, and child self-report measures are increasingly used. However, there is limited reporting of children’s comprehension and engagement with these measures within local settings. The Child Food Insecurity Experiences Scale (CFIES) is a 10-item child self-report tool that is widely used, despite limited validity evidence. This study aimed to explore the face and content validity of the CFIES in an Australian context. Methods: We used cognitive interviews with 25 children aged 8–12 years to document CFIES comprehension. Data were analyzed using inductive and deductive approaches. Results: Children demonstrated awareness of FI (even when food secure themselves) and displayed sophisticated understanding of its social ramifications. While the overall perception of the tool was generally positive, we uncovered that not all key terms or emotion words were universally understood, potentially impacting validity. Similarly, conditional clauses or question modifiers were sometimes overlooked. In addition, the 12-month response timeframe and the answering categories (“many times”, “one or two times” or “never”) proved challenging for some children. In addition to the item-specific impressions, children provided nuanced ideation across four broader themes, which may impact item interpretation and willingness to answer: perceptions of hunger; micro and macroeconomics affecting households; social identity and comparison; and caregiver protection dynamics. Children indicated the need to consider survey modality and ensure privacy. Conclusions: A global tool that reflects children’s cross-cultural conceptualization of FI represents a pragmatic and feasible way to monitor change in FI across regions and may aid advocacy efforts. However, this study suggests the need for further modifications to the CFIES and the necessity to build rapport with communities and organizations that allow for the interpretation of the data within the contextual considerations. Full article

Background/Objectives: The psychological state affects perceived pain and can be modulated by emotions and attention. Pain experiences are prevalent in dental treatment and play a key role in the development of dental anxiety and treatment avoidance. This study hypothesizes that video and audio that are either pain-relevant or neutral will impact pain perception, self-reported stress, and physiological stress in a dental setting differently. Methods: Eighty participants were randomized into a no-stimuli control group and four experimental groups, in which they were exposed to pain-relevant or neutral video or audio recordings. Heat pain was administered to the participants’ forearms before and after the video or audio exposure, and participants rated the pain using a computerized visual analogue scale. Skin conductance levels (SCLs) were measured to indicate arousal levels. Results: Pain reports were significantly higher in the control group compared to all other groups (all p-values < 0.05), except for those who viewed the surgical video. Also, both pain reports and SCLs were significantly higher during the pain-relevant video compared to the neutral video (p < 0.05). Conclusions: The interplay between the psychological state, emotion, attention and pain perception in dental care should be explored further, particularly regarding its potential relevance for pain control and supportive clinical environments. Full article

Background: In contemporary society, marked by rapid transformations in the sphere of communication and social interaction, social networks have gone beyond the role of simple communication platforms, becoming places where identities are formed, cultural norms are negotiated and self-perceptions are shaped. This reality has generated a growing interest in studying the relationship between the digital environment and health behaviors, especially among young people, a social category extremely receptive to visual and normative influences promoted online. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among students enrolled in different kinds of faculties and specialties. An online questionnaire was distributed to gather socio-demographic, academic and medical data along with lifestyle and health-related behaviors. Several psychometric instruments were used: Health Behaviour Scale (HBS) to measure various dimensions of health-related actions, Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS) to screen for addictive or problematic social media use, Social Media Disorder Scale (SMDS) to measure the problematic social media use among adolescents, Body Appreciation Scale–2 (BAS-2) to evaluate measure of one’s acceptance, favorable opinions and respect of their own body, and Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) to identify the psychological motives behind overeating. Results: More than 70% of students declared that they had their first smartphone before the age of 12 and 65% of students had screentime higher than 3 h per day during the weekdays, with a small increase during the weekends. Women scored higher than men in emotional eating (food consumption in response to negative emotions), and external eating (response to food stimuli in the environment, independent of hunger). Respondents from rural areas showed a significantly lower level of respect and acceptance of their own body and higher risk for Social Media Disorder compared to participants from urban areas. Important statistical correlation has been identified among the variables of the research. Social media addiction was associated with higher emotional eating both directly and indirectly, via lower body appreciation. The analysis also indicated that it does not show a direct relationship with restrictive eating behaviors; rather, its association with restrained eating is fully mediated by the individual’s body appreciation. Conclusions: The use of social platforms is a challenging process, with a great impact on psychological and emotional balance of young people. Even if the study identified a normative use among young people with a high education level, the risks factors should be taken into consideration when dealing with screentime, psychological and mental health and the risk for addiction. Full article

With the rapid development of social media and online interactive platforms, online public opinion has become a vital information source for public emotional expression, social risk perception, and decision support. However, public opinion texts are typically characterized by short length, obscure semantics, complex emotional expressions, and strong context dependence, making it difficult for traditional lexicon-based or shallow neural network methods to achieve stable and robust performance in sentiment discrimination tasks. To address these issues, this paper proposes BERT-BiLSTM-MHSA-Capsule (BBMC), hereafter referred to as BBMC, an online public opinion sentiment analysis model based on multi-level semantic feature fusion. The model first utilizes the pretrained language model BERT to extract dynamic semantic representations with context-aware capabilities; subsequently, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network is employed to model the bidirectional temporal dependencies within the texts, while a Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanism is introduced to achieve adaptive focusing on key emotional information. Building upon this, a three-layer cascaded capsule network is constructed to achieve structured modeling of high-order emotional attributes through vector neurons and dynamic routing mechanisms, effectively mitigating the loss of spatial feature information caused by traditional pooling and fully connected structures. Experimental results on a manually annotated online public opinion dataset show that BBMC achieves better performance than the evaluated baseline models in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1-score. These results indicate the empirical effectiveness of the proposed task-oriented feature-integration strategy and capsule-based classification head for online public opinion sentiment analysis. Full article

Background/Objectives: Psychological safety is increasingly recognized as a clinically relevant construct linked to emotional regulation, interpersonal functioning, and trauma-related processes. Emerging evidence suggests that psychological safety may depend not only on embodied experiences of bodily regulation but also on how individuals relate to themselves under conditions of distress. The present study investigated the role of self-compassion and body perception on psychological safety. Methods: A total of 332 community participants were administered the Neuroception of Psychological Safety Scale (NPSS), the Body Perception Questionnaire-22 (BPQ-22), the Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form (SCS-SF), and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21). Spearman’s correlations, hierarchical multiple regression analyses, and mediation analyses were conducted using SPSS to examine the relationships among the study variables. Results: Psychological safety showed a moderate positive association with self-compassion and a weak negative association with body perception. Body perception was also negatively associated with self-compassion. In hierarchical regression models, self-compassion emerged as the strongest predictor of psychological safety, whereas the predictive effect of body perception became non-significant after self-compassion entered the model. Mediation analyses further demonstrated that self-compassion fully mediated the association between body perception and psychological safety. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the relationship between bodily experience and psychological safety may primarily depend on individuals’ capacity to respond to internal experiences with compassion directed towards oneself. Self-compassion may therefore represent a clinically relevant target for interventions aimed at enhancing psychological safety. Full article

This study investigates the effectiveness of peer assessment as a formative learning strategy in multilingual English-Medium Instruction (EMI) higher education. Although peer assessment is widely associated with enhanced learner engagement, self-regulation, and feedback literacy, its implementation in linguistically diverse EMI settings remains insufficiently explored. Addressing this gap, the study examines students’ perceptions of peer assessment, the degree of alignment between peer and instructor evaluations, and students’ reflective experiences in a multilingual university context. A mixed-methods design was employed with 60 undergraduate students enrolled in EMI courses at South East European University in North Macedonia. Quantitative data were collected through a structured questionnaire and peer-assessment rubric, while qualitative data were obtained from reflective interviews with 37 students. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, and paired-samples t-tests, whereas qualitative responses were examined through thematic analysis. The findings reveal generally positive student perceptions of peer assessment, particularly regarding self-reflection, critical thinking, collaboration, and confidence in evaluating academic work. Significant positive correlations among key dimensions of feedback literacy suggest that peer assessment supports interconnected cognitive and metacognitive learning processes. Although a statistically significant difference emerged between peer and instructor scores, overall agreement was moderate, with students tending to assign slightly lower marks than instructors. Qualitative findings further indicate that peer assessment enhanced students’ understanding of assessment criteria and learning processes while also exposing challenges related to language proficiency, emotional discomfort, and concerns about feedback accuracy. The study demonstrates that peer assessment can be an effective pedagogical approach in multilingual EMI classrooms when supported by clear assessment criteria, structured guidance, and feedback training. These findings contribute to research on feedback literacy, formative assessment, and multilingual learning in higher education. Full article