Designing patient education and counseling practices

Patient education and counselling are essential constituents of interaction between a patient and a healthcare organisation. This study explores patient education and counselling practices, focusing on the opportunities of modern technology in the development of interaction with patients. With the help of a qualitative study we illustrate nurses' conceptions about the topic and discuss future opportunities. Our approach is distinctively patient centred; all discussion about the use of technology is from the point-of-view of patient's well-being and empowerment.

Less, slower, better. Do information society visions have healthy alternatives?

Relaxed and connected: Insights into the emotional–motivational constituents of musical pleasure

Music is a source of daily pleasure, and positive emotional experiences and rewarding functions of music have been actively studied. Yet, knowledge about the interrelatedness of emotional and motivational constituents of musical pleasure is sparse. This study explored the characteristic emotional contents of music-induced pleasure, their relation to motivations for music and whether the underlying dimensionality of these aspects was specific to music (in comparison to the visual domain). Data were collected through an online questionnaire ( N = 464), measuring evoked emotions and motivational pleasure types that the respondents related to a musical piece or a visual object inducing pleasur…

Aspects of values in human-technology interaction design : a content-based view to values

Content-Based Approach in Exploring the Cognitive Structure of Values

This article discusses the content-based approach in examination of values. In the content-based approach, human thinking in different contexts is set at the focal point, and attention is devoted to those cognitive processes through which mental representations are constructed. The information contents of mental representations play a decisive role in understanding human behavior. By applying content-based analysis to an examination of the conceptual contents of human values, it is possible to reach a deeper understanding of the cognitive structure which lies as the motivational foundation of actions. In this article, it is argued that different informational contents of values explain vari…

Ambivalent emotional experiences of everyday visual and musical objects.

Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences—in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts—disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the experience of pleasure is far more complicated. This study explored the nature of pleasure evoked by everyday aesthetic objects. A mixture of statistical and qualitative methods was applied in the analysis of the data collected through a semi-structure…

Constituents of Music and Visual-Art Related Pleasure - A Critical Integrative Literature Review.

The present literature review investigated how pleasure induced by music and visualart has been conceptually understood in empirical research over the past 20 years. After an initial selection of abstracts from seven databases (keywords: pleasure, reward, enjoyment, and hedonic), twenty music and eleven visual-art papers were systematically compared. The following questions were addressed: (1) What is the role of the keyword in the research question? (2) Is pleasure considered a result of variation in the perceiver’s internal or external attributes? (3) What are the most commonly employed methods and main variables in empirical settings? Based on these questions, our critical integrative an…

Emotions of music listening in Finland and in India : Comparison of an individualistic and a collectivistic culture

Music is appreciated for emotional reasons across cultures, but knowledge on the cross-cultural similarities and differences of music-evoked emotions is still sparse. The current study compared music-evoked emotions in Finland and in India, contextualizing them within the perceived psychological functionality of music in an individualistic versus collectivistic culture. Participants ( N = 230) answered an online survey on music-evoked emotions and related personal meanings. A mixed-method approach using factor analysis and qualitative content analysis was used to identify the concepts for cross-cultural comparison. Results show that both cultures value music for positive emotional experien…

The Effect of Memory in Inducing Pleasant Emotions with Musical and Pictorial Stimuli

Music is known to evoke emotions through a range of mechanisms, but empirical investigation into the mechanisms underlying different emotions is sparse. This study investigated how affective experiences to music and pictures vary when induced by personal memories or mere stimulus features. Prior to the experiment, participants were asked to select eight types of stimuli according to distinct criteria concerning the emotion induction mechanism and valence. In the experiment, participants (N = 30) evaluated their affective experiences with the self-chosen material. EEG was recorded throughout the session. The results showed certain interaction effects of mechanism (memory vs. stimulus feature…

Content-Based Approach in Exploring the Cognitive Structure of Values

This article discusses the content-based approach in examination of values. In the content-based approach, human thinking in different contexts is set at the focal point, and attention is devoted to those cognitive processes through which mental representations are constructed. The information contents of mental representations play a decisive role in understanding human behavior. By applying content-based analysis to an examination of the conceptual contents of human values, it is possible to reach a deeper understanding of the cognitive structure which lies as the motivational foundation of actions. In this article, it is argued that different informational contents of values explain vari…