Ice hockey is considered one of the most competitive sports, and it requires physical and mental preparation to perform appropriately under the pressure of a competitive environment. The present study aims to investigate the impact of competitive sports on executive functions such as emotion regulation, inhibitory control, working memory, and competitive attitudes among near-elite ice hockey players. Near-elite athletes have been gathered (N = 67) from the four Hungarian Ice-Hockey Academies. Our results indicated a small positive association between Canadian points and maladaptive emotion regulation and a slight positive correlation between maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation and false alarms of the N-back task. The result revealed a significant difference between National and Non-National Team members in maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation regarding hypercompetitive attitude. The result of linear regression revealed that maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation significantly predicts false alarms, indicating that the maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation explains 10% of the variance. In conclusion, we highlight the role of the environment, which affects executive functions and competitive attitudes alongside sports performance. Although the findings were mainly correlational, we can conclude that the nature of competitive ice hockey expects certain behavior for the players indifferent of the situation that could lead to emotion suppression, rumi-nation and other maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. We can also conclude that inadequate emotion regulation might be related to the overstimulation of players, characterized by a hypersensitive state to stimuli. We suggest that practitioners ensure the development of adequate competitive attitudes of players to enable long-term physical and psychological benefits.

Counterurbanization, rural in-migrant trend studies rarely focus on the individual decision-making process. This paper studies the mindset patterns and frames the decision to select organic farming as a next career. We aimed to deepen our understanding of the complex reasoning that motivates newcomers to choose organic farming on a personal level. Based on semi-structured interviews, we developed a questionnaire and collected data from the newcomer to organic farming community in Hungary. The responses were analyzed using: (1) factor analysis to assess the dimensionality of the factors and (2) knowledge-based expert system to identify the logical connections between the aspirations. Our conceptual model was developed based on if-then rules between the identified aspirations, which describe the mindset patterns of newcomers to organic farming.

Broader academic and professional society have realized that the best way of learning and integrating valuable life and professional experience is by learning from experience of others through mentoring processes. Led by the same idea and as a proactive effort to foster their global competitiveness top students from two most influenced graduate schools in Croatia gathered within eSTUDENT organization and they have started virtual mentorship program in which they try to organize cooperation between senior undergraduate students and acknowledged members of academic society and business world who have Croatian heritage. Its goal is to give students that are willing to take initiative and responsibility extracurricular education with the purpose of creating competitive workforce that is going to core of the national competitiveness and value creation.