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This study aims to present the extent to which online education influenced the level of empathy displayed by university students. The research relies on a self-evaluated applied survey in two European countries: Portugal and Romania. The participants in this research are 1,085 students enrolled in Communication Studies programs. The purpose of this study is to unfold the connection between gender, exposure to digital technology, empathy level according to the Basic Empathy Scale applied to young adults, and online education self-perception that involves the use of webcams. Empathy can have positive effects on students' satisfaction and increase students' outcomes. The shift from a physical environment to a digital one brought significant challenges that most students and teachers were not ready for. The digital environment influences how empathy is expressed. The present research found evidence of a relationship between exposure to technology usage, emotional contagion, and gender. This suggests that understanding the emotions of others might be inhibited during digital education. Also, the most relevant factor of empathy variation in online education is gender. The findings of the present research may contribute to the design of activities or programs that could foster empathy expression during online education for young adults.

The importance of nutrition as a research topic is linked not only to healthy eating and different types of medical conditions, such as obesity, allergies, malnutrition, but also to the relationship between nutrition and physical activity, to state’s and large food companies’ commercial activities, as well as to the sustainability of food production. On that basis, numerous studies have analyzed media content related to food and nutrition, their basic assumption being that (new and old) media have the ability to change the audience’s perceptions, behaviors and attitudes towards various values which are accepted in contemporary societies. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of the way in which Romanian and German media cover the topic of nutrition. The research method used was the content analysis, applied to a sample of articles published on online media from the two countries between 2014 and 2016. Having as research objective the identification of the most relevant aspects regarding the content and shape of nutrition’s coverage in media, this article discusses the similarities and differences recorded in the online press of the two countries on the topic of interest. According to the findings, the similarities are mainly related to some topics and subjects addressed, as well as to the ways of covering them, in particular through analysis articles, while the differences could instead be ascertained regarding the content of the articles, including the ways in which the journalists assume social roles in approaching, informing, debating, and educating concerning issues of public interest.

The contemporary societies face the obstacles encountered in developing a deeper understanding of the role played by ration and logic, on the one hand, and, on the other, by fantasies and dreams in imagining and planning the future. These difficulties and obstacles have yet to be overcome, despite today's well-known confluence between science and popular culture, and scholarly interest in understanding the connection between people's feelings toward a fictional text and research policy. Over time, imaginative narratives have allowed people either to escape from real life (through fantasy or daydreaming) or to make predictions about the future of reality, constituting a source of inspiration for the progress of mankind. The purpose of this article is to point out a "map" of the methods used in a project about the future of food and the food of the future as they result from existing scientific literature on this topic. After the presentation of specific methods of research that can be used in such a project about food and future, the article presents also the first results of a first pre-test of the "First-person theory of documentation" method which was performed on a sample of fifteen students from the University of Bucharest. The results confirmed existence of a typology of approaches to the future from the food point of view proposed by Belasco, namely the "modern future", and the "future recombination". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]