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The psychological background of unemployment - the chance of a new start or the risk of stagnation?
181-202Views:58The aim of this paper is to present the state of unemployment and its psychological processes and consequences, and to summarise the results of psychological tests completed by jobseekers participating in the HURO Rural Youthjobs project.
We begin by clarifying the concept of unemployment. 'Unemployment is defined as the situation in which someone is unable to find an acceptable job in the labour market for a prolonged period of time' (Hajduska 2012: 119). Another definition is that 'persons who are not employed during the (defined) reference period but are employable and make active efforts to find a job are considered unemployed' (Haugen and Bregger, 1994; cited in László et al., 1998, p. 1).Unemployment can arise as a result of redundancies, layoffs, but it can also be caused by a protracted search among young people starting out in their careers (Hajduska, 2012) Whatever the cause, unemployment is a social phenomenon that can take many forms (Bánfalvy, 1997)
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“Can’t you see that we are in trouble?” – The environmental protection-related ignorance, its appearance in visual attentional patterns, and some possible explanation/interpretation
49-69Views:46The environmental crisis is an outstanding topic nowadays. Given that it is basically caused
by human activity, this issue is worth examining at all levels of society. The present study
investigated the individuals’ visual attentional patterns and the possible attentional biases related to pictures displaying environmental problems, in comparison to undisturbed nature
and social scenes as control stimuli, within the framework of a reaction-time task. Changes
in participants’ mood and their self-reported environmental awareness were also measured.
However, only the negative social scenes resulted attentional bias, the environmental topics
were not able to do that. Albeit the mood of the participants deteriorated during the experiment,
it did not have any correlation with any other variables, and either did the environmental
awareness. We displayed the stimuli during the task only for a short period of time, thereby we
targeted to reach automatic attentional responses. Our results reflect to the fact, that the topic
of the environmental crisis is not suitable to do this. This phenomenon propounds the demand of
explanations behind this phenomenon (like the possible evolutionary background).