Hotel experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic: high-touch versus high-tech

Purpose This study aims to gain an understanding of hotel experiences during the pandemic by examining sentiments of guests posted online. Design/methodology/approach This paper incorporates the balance theory, in a dyadic system to analyze the ways in which guests were motivated to restore a position of balance during the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. Qualitative content analysis was used to detect thematic patterns of hotel experiences based on examining online reviews shared by actual guests of two major hotel brands – one more closely associated with convenience-driven automation (high-tech) and the other known for providing more guest–employee interaction (high-touch). Findings The analysis of the reviews yielded six main themes: “purpose of visit,” “COVID safety concerns,” “technology adoption,” “COVID limitations,” “exceeded expectation” and “hospitality of staff.” Staff displaying a welcoming attitude was the main factor in creating a convivial experience for guests at both hotel brands, but the technology was not highlighted as much in guests’ reviews. Despite the pandemic, guests of both hotel brands had similar levels of enjoyment regarding their hotel experiences regardless of the high-touch or high-tech nature of the operations. Research limitations/implications User-generated content often reflects the opinions of those who are very satisfied or not satisfied at all. Different data collection techniques could be used to get a “big picture” view of the balance between high-touch and high-tech experiences. Practical implications The findings offer support to researchers and practitioners who advocate that high-touch and high-tech can indeed co-exist, and that these distinct service delivery modes do not have to be mutually exclusive. Originality/value This paper provides new trajectories that can broaden the approaches undertaken by hospitality/tourism scholars and practitioners based on user-generated content. This study is one of the first to adopt the lens of the balance theory, in a dyadic system, to investigate how guests may be psychologically motivated to balance their perceptions and expectations during a time of crisis.

Marital Effects in Later Life: Dyadic Approaches and Gender Differences

Marriage is a dyadic system, within which the characteristics and experiences of each partner can have implications for both. Moreover, gender of both spouses may impact these dyadic influences. The five papers comprising this symposium all take a dyadic approach to studying midlife and older couples, and how their effects on one another may vary by gender. Donnelly examines the consequences of precarious work among midlife couples, finding heightened risks for marital strain and divorce, depending on which gender spouse is exposed to precarious work. Garcia also analyzes gender differences – in this case, how the gender of a woman’s spouse may affect associations between daily marital strain and sleep quality, with only women married to men showing adverse sleep outcomes. Polenick and colleagues study the long-term repercussions of chronic condition discordance, finding that both individual-level and couple-level discordance had impacts for husbands’ and wives’ physical activity. Gallagher and Stokes focus on cognitive functioning within dyads, revealing gendered effects: Wives’ poorer cognitive functioning was associated with their own (better) marital quality, while husbands’ poorer cognitive functioning was associated with wives’ (worse) marital quality. Lastly, Stokes and Barooah examine longitudinal dyadic associations between loneliness and vascular health, finding that own and partner’s baseline loneliness were associated with increased HbA1c levels only in the context of inferior marital support. Carr will assess the strengths and limitations of these papers, and discuss the contributions these studies can make to the field and to future research on marital effects and gender in later life.

Questioning questions in psychotherapeutic practice: The dialogical dynamics of change in therapy through clients questioning therapists

The focus of this study is a particular type of questioning in psychotherapy: The unusual, yet recurrent, phenomenon of clients asking questions or making requests to the therapist and the way this alters the dialogical dynamics and therapeutic alliance between the two. Thus, we investigate how these types of question-answer cycles challenge the balance of the dialogical system of therapy including the normally accepted asymmetrical power relation between therapist and client. The analysis is informed by an ecological perspective which views the dialogical collaboration of therapist and client as forming a distributed cognitive system. The study shows how disaffiliation to questioning cycles on one hand stress the dialogical system through changing the language game, yet on the other hand, also entertain a subtle form of cooperativeness. The questioning cycles inform the dyadic system of therapist and client so that precautions can be made in order to secure the therapeutic alliance.

Conflict Dynamics and the Transformation of the Parent-Adolescent Relationship

Parent-adolescent conflicts are an important feature of adolescent development. Conflicts have been associated with adolescent psychosocial adjustment, the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship, and the development of adolescent autonomy and interpersonal problem-solving skills. In this chapter, I explore the role of parent-adolescent conflicts in the transformation of the parent-adolescent relationship from the dynamic systems perspective. First, I introduce a model of the parent-adolescent relationship as a temporal interpersonal emotion system (TIES) that consists of two self-regulating individuals within a dyadic system at multiple time scales. Then, I review research on parent-adolescent conflicts that demonstrates parent-adolescent TIES using the dynamic systems concepts of attractors, flexibility and rigidity, and phase transitions. Finally, I discuss the value that the dynamic systems approach brings to understanding parent-adolescent conflicts as an important interpersonal developmental context by pointing to important future directions in research and applied settings.

MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS OF ONE-DIMENSIONAL BIASED WALKS

For an infinite sequence [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] with probability [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], we mainly study the multifractal analysis of one-dimensional biased walks. Let [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. The Hausdorff and packing dimensions of the sets [Formula: see text] are [Formula: see text], which is the development of the theorem of Besicovitch [On the sum of digits of real numbers represented in the dyadic system, Math. Ann. 110 (1934) 321–330] on random walk, saying that: For any [Formula: see text], the set [Formula: see text] has Hausdorff dimension [Formula: see text].

"Un fiume l'attraversa": navigare la terapia di coppia secondo la prospettiva del sé e della regolazione interattiva

- Approach, by Jacqueline Gotthold The author compares the couple's journey to the incredible and changing currents of a river. First it is rough, then it is slow and majestic; its flow shows the phases of expression, narration, articulation and change of the couple in therapy. Given that all relations are supposedly co-created, dyadic, dynamic, bi -directional and self and interactively regulated, Gotthold maintains that in the couple's treatment it is necessary to understand the miscues that have surfaced during the emergent process of the dyadic system of the co-creation. If all goes well, the couple will be able to understand and to change the dyadic regulatory processes in order to proceed in a "healthy" and co-agreed manner. To maintain her theory the author refers to the contributions of Bebee and Lachman's Infant Research with specific references to the concepts of coordination, equilibrium, and mutual influence systems, on the Study of the Boston Group on transformation and on the notion of implicit relational knowing. Through a clinical example, Gotthold shows how it is possible in couple's therapy, to transform a system from a bi-directional to a tri-directional one. Understanding the bi-directional and self and interactively regulated dimensions of the relationship we are investigating, aids the implicit and explicit and procedural interpretations that are necessary to change the system.

Complexity of Motivation for Artificial Insemination by Donor

A thorough evaluation of underlying motives for a decision by patients to make use of artificial insemination by a donor as a possible solution for the problem of involuntary childlessness as result of the male factor, should be a necessary prerequisite for the use of this procedure. In such a situation, an external factor (semen of an anonymous donor) is introduced to a complex dyadic system which is particularly susceptible to emotional stress. The implications of various less conspicuous but extremely important motives in the behaviour of such patients are stressed.

Analysis and System: A Marriage

Self-psychology describes a psychoanalytic model developed by Heinz Kohut and based upon a systemic concept of the ‘self-object’, a system of self and object which differentiates progressively from an early symbiotic fusion at birth to healthy interdependence at around three years of age. These stages of differentiation were originally described by Margaret Mahler and interpreted by her within a Kleinian framework. Self-psychology differs in many key concepts from the Kleinian and other psychoanalytic models, and Kohut reinterpreted Mahler's work from this new perspective. The systemic or dyadic basis of Kohutian theory provides a bridge between psychoanalytic models and systems models of marital dynamics, an important meeting ground for interpsychic and intrapsychic viewpoints. Progressive differentiation within a dyadic system can be applied developmentally to the mother-infant, husband-wife, or therapist-patient dyad, as can the self-object transference concept.