What skills are becoming key in today's job market? How do attachment patterns affect emotion recognition at different ages? When do our thoughts wander during the day? You can find the answers to these questions in the November publications by ELTE PPK researchers.
Changing expectations on the job market
The study provides a comprehensive overview of the transformation of labour market competency requirements over the past decade, based on a systematic analysis of international, large-scale labour market reports (WEF, OECD, Cedefop) and relevant literature. By comparing previous forecasts with current trends, it shows how technological development, digitalization, globalization, demographic changes, and sustainability challenges are shaping employer expectations. The analysis focuses on the increasing importance of transversal competences – personal and social, learning, problem-solving and digital competences – while also emphasizing the changing role of professional and technical knowledge. The study combines economic, pedagogical and management perspectives in an integrated framework.
The results show that success in the labour market is increasingly based on transversal competencies that complement professional and technological skills. The analysis provides guidance for education and training systems to support conscious adaptation to changing needs.
The effect of attachment on emotion recognition
Our attachment patterns significantly influence the quality of our social relationships and interactions, and these effects often manifest themselves in the way we interpret the behaviour and thoughts of others. The study examined a sample of adolescents and adults to determine the extent to which attachment avoidance and anxiety distort the ability to correctly identify emotions. The results show that adolescents prone to avoidance are less accurate at identifying emotions based on facial expressions than their peers with low avoidance, and this effect is particularly evident in positive emotions. In contrast, a tendency toward anxiety is associated with more successful identification of positive emotions at this age. The results also show that attachment characteristics are primarily associated with emotion recognition in adolescents, with the effects significantly diminishing in adulthood, suggesting that
later social experiences can compensate for the disadvantages resulting from early attachment injuries.
The daily rhythm of wandering thoughts
The study examined how mind wandering manifests itself in everyday life and how it is influenced by circadian factors. Using an experience-based sampling method, the researchers analysed the daily dynamics of mind-wandering and its relationship to chronotype, i.e., individual preference for earlier or later activity and sleep times. The analyses showed systematic fluctuations depending on the time of day, but surprisingly, this effect was not chronotype-specific. In addition to frequency, they also examined the temporal orientation of thoughts, i.e., whether they tended to be about the past, present, or future. They found that these tendencies change throughout the day in a chronotype-dependent manner: while evening types tend to think about the future in the evening and the present in the morning, the opposite is true for morning types.
The results suggest that spontaneous mental activity in everyday situations is not random, but follows predictable daily rhythms, which are presumably modulated by individual physiological and behavioural characteristics.
The study of this phenomenon in the context of the sleep-wake cycle complements laboratory research and highlights the ecological conditions under which spontaneous thinking can occur in a more favourable or more disruptive form.