The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to deliver parenting and mental health support services to families. This narrative review illustrates the diverse ways in which ICT is being used across Europe to provide family support to different populations. We distinguish between the use of ICT in professional-led and peer-led support and provide implementation examples from across Europe. We discuss the potential advantages and disadvantages of different ways of using ICT in family support and the main developments and challenges for the field more generally, guiding decision-making as to how to use ICT in family support, as well as critical reflections and future research on its merit.

To become a teacher one must possess a minimum of pedagogical competences, obtained by the completion of pedagogical-psychological-didactic-methodical education. It is assumed that it will be followed by professional growth in the foreseeable future – but that does not necessarily happen. One way to provide a better head start for prospective teachers and their future students is to implement a service-learning (S-L) – a pedagogical approach that combines academic coursework with voluntary service in the community. The aim of this study is to determine the initial interest of students for engaging in service-learning within compulsory courses of pedagogical-psychological-didactic-methodical education and to investigate the relationship between the level of service-learning information and the reported interest in service-learning. Participants were 42 graduate students, divided into two groups – experimental (attended a lecture on service-learning between measurements) and control group (no intervention between two measurements). Results demonstrate high(est) interest for service learning within the course Psychology of Education. Prospective teachers that attended the lecture on service-learning became more interested in it. Most of the students think that engaging in service-learning would lead to higher motivation and better knowledge of the course. These findings should encourage teachers and policy-makers to consider the implementation of S-L in educational institutions in order to improve educational efficiency on all levels of the educational system.

Background and aims: Pain modulation via expectation is a well-documented phenomenon. So far it has been shown that expectations about effectiveness of a certain treatment enhance the effectiveness of different analgesics and of drug-free pain treatments. Also, studies demonstrate that people assess same-intensity stimuli differently, depending on the experimentally induced expectations regarding the characteristics of the stimuli. Prolonged effect of expectation on pain perception and possible symmetry in conditions of lower- and higher-intensity stimuli is yet to be studied. Aim of this study is to determine the effect of expectation on the perception of pain experimentally induced by the series of higher- and lower-intensity stimuli. Methods: 192 healthy participants were assigned to four experimental groups differing by expectations regarding the intensity of painful stimuli series. Expectations of two groups were congruent with actual stimuli; one group expected and received lower-intensity stimuli and the other expected and received higher-intensity stimuli. Expectations of the remaining two groups were not congruent with actual stimuli; one group expected higher-intensity stimuli, but actually received lower-intensity stimuli while the other group expected lower-intensity stimuli, but in fact received higher-intensity ones. Each group received a series of 24 varied-intensity electrical stimuli rated by the participants on a 30° intensity scale. Results: Expectation manipulation had statistically significant effect on pain intensity assessment. When expecting lower-intensity stimuli, the participants underestimated pain intensity and when expecting higher-intensity stimuli, they overestimated pain intensity. The effect size of expectations upon pain intensity assessment was equal for both lower- and higher-intensity stimuli. Conclusion: The obtained results imply that expectation manipulation can achieve the desired effect of decreasing or increasing both slight and more severe pain for a longer period of time. Manipulation via expectation before the stimuli series was proven to be effective for pain modulation in the entire series of stimuli which lasted around 10 min. The results suggest a potential benefit of manipulating expectations to alleviate emerging pain, since the obtained effects are moderate to large. Implications: It seems that expectation effect is strong enough to “overcome” even the direct effect of stimulus intensity (at least in the low to moderate intensity range), which suggests potential benefits of verbal instructions even in rather painful stimuli.

The aim was to examine the effect of the experimenter?s social status and its interaction with participant?s gender on pressure pain threshold. Both male and female students participated in the study (N = 96) and were evenly assigned into two groups which differed only in the professional status of the experimenter who was a professor (higher status) in one group and a student (lower status) in the other. The factorial ANOVA revealed statistically significant and large main effects of the experimenter?s status and the participants? gender, indicating higher pain thresholds in male participants and in the higher status experimenter group. Although both males and females had higher pain thresholds when measured by a higher status experimenter, a statistically significant interaction revealed that status affected male participants more so than females. The obtained results are probably due to social behaviour, emphasizing relevance of the experimenter?s and participants? characteristics in pain measurement.

According to the bio-ecological model, individuals are highly influenced by the context and dynamic interactions occurring within their environment over time. Therefore, prolonged shared contexts that people are exposed to, such as the higher education system, should contribute to more similarities in their cognition. We examine two research models, specifying the influence of the national higher education system as a variable, that moderates the potential relationship between the students’ country of origin and their prosocial (Model 1) and pro-environmental (Model 2) attitudes. Two culturally similar countries (Croatia and Italy) and two student subsamples from both countries (one group with social science and humanities majors and another with business and economics major) are considered. We used A. F. Hayes’ PROCESS macro to estimate the results using the regression approach. The research results show statistically significantmoderated relationships between study major and prosocial and pro-environmental attitudes. However, the national HE contexts, when considered as moderating variables, suppressed the main effects in both models. We discuss possible explanations of the suppression of the main effect by the conditional one, outline implications of the present findings and provide guidelines for future research.