At present, a healthy diet appears to be one of the suitable strategies in slowing down cognitive decline in the process of aging. A number of evidence-based studies confirm its efficacy, safety, and cost-effectiveness. The aim of this mini review is to evaluate and describe recent randomized clinical and cohort studies exploring the effect of healthy diet on cognitive performance among healthy seniors, as well as to update the existing information on this research issue. For these reasons, the authors reviewed full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles written in English and available in Web of Science and PubMed between September 2017 and February 2020. Altogether nine original studies were detected. The results indicate that healthy diet and healthy diet components generally have a positive impact on the enhancement of cognitive functions. Furthermore, the findings reveal that dietary patterns, as well as single nutrients might have a significant effect on specific cognitive domains, such as memory in general, episodic memory, or processing speed. It also seems that a strict adherence to the dietary patterns and a higher diet variety have a more significant effect on the improvement of cognitive functions. Nevertheless, there seem to be gender differences in dietary behavior. More recently, personalized dietary interventions started to be used in delaying cognitive decline among healthy seniors. Therefore, more randomized control trials or N-of-1 trials should be performed in this research area in order to detect the most suitable dietary pattern or nutrients, which would, together with other modifiable lifestyle factors, contribute to the improvement of quality of life of the aging population.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of the educational system, including students’ learning styles, which are heavily dependent on self-regulated studying strategies and motivation. The purpose of this study was to discover whether Central European students, in this case the Slovak and Czech students, were able to perform self-regulated learning during online learning under the COVID-19 pandemic to achieve their learning goals and improve academic performance, as well as to propose a few practical recommendations how to develop and maintain students’ self-regulation learning in this new online environment. The methodology was based on a questionnaire survey conducted among 268 students at two Central European universities in February and March 2021. The findings indicate that Central European students seemed to be able to perform their online self-study, especially in regard to personal competencies, meaningfulness and motivation. They reported higher awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in learning, time management, and/or the usefulness of making an effort to study. However, the findings reveal an urgent need for more work to be done in the area of metacognitive strategies, such as reflective and critical thinking, analyzing and evaluating. In this respect, the teacher’s role is replaceable since s/he serves as a facilitator and promotes these metacognitive strategies by providing students with constructive feedback, monitoring their learning, reviewing their progress, and/or providing opportunities to reflect on their learning. There were not any striking differences between the Czech and Slovak students. Nevertheless, Slovak students (females in particular) seemed to be more self-disciplined and goal-oriented in their learning.

Ageing is becoming a big social issue nowadays. For example, in 2000 the percentage of older individuals aged 65+ years reached 12.4% worldwide. In 2030, this number should rise to 19% and in 2050 to 22%. Therefore, there is a need to prolong an active life of older people, especially by implementing non-pharmacological approaches. Current technological devices and services can assist them in this process. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the use of the Internet among older people in the Czech Republic with respect to their age. The key methods exploited in this study include a questionnaire survey, statistical processing of data collection, as well as evaluation of both empirical and theoretical fi ndings on the research issue. The results indicate that the age is a decisive factor in the use of the Internet by seniors. In fact, the use of the Internet falls with the declining age with the breakthrough age 75+years. Generally, older people use the Internet for communication purposes with the help of e-mail, the most frequent ICT tool for this generation group. Nevertheless, the fi ndings of this study show that the second most common reason for the use of the Internet is the Internet banking, followed by Skype communication and photo sharing. The results also suggest that older people should be trained in the use of the Internet since the training may help them overcome both psychological and social barriers, which represent the constraints in their use of the Internet. Furthermore, seniors could be divided into three basic age groups according to their special needs, which should be considered when designing new technological devices or services for these aging population groups, which could help them to enhance cognitive functions.

Positive psychology has recently seen unprecedented rise and has reached vast achievements in the area of quality of life (QoL) improvement. The purpose of this study is to show that there are different aspects of well-being that make healthy older people motivated to learn a foreign language at a later age. The research was conducted in the Czech Republic and Poland in two groups of learners aged 55 years and more. The experimental group consisted of 105 Czech respondents who were targeted with an online questionnaire with the aim to determine the level of FLL outcomes connected to QoL in healthy older adults in their L2 acquisition. The second experimental group (n = 100) was established of Polish seniors who attended similar language courses. The findings of the research clearly show that FLL has an irreplaceable role as one of several non-pharmacological strategies utilized to improve the aging process and reduce drawbacks of aging. The results indicate that seniors' overall satisfaction and subjective feelings of well-being are enormously high when attending foreign language classes at older age. FLL, therefore, creates an environment that can enhance QoL of older adults that can be supplemented by other means such as well-balanced diet, other social activities, sport and physical activity, music, or computer games. All these intervention methods can significantly improve QoL of older adults and the parties engaged and/or responsible for taking care of older generation should take it into serious consideration.

The goal of the article is to find the answer whether it is possible to propose a model for fixing the best debt levels in the capital structure of non-profit organisations. Capital structure is an indicator that corroborates the level of financial risk. Non-profit organisations are an essential part of the general social policy. When considering the efficiency of non-profit entities from a donor perspective, it is important to take into account the way management uses the resources of a non-profit organisation as well as efficiency of that management activity. Non-profit organisation efficiency should be considered in the context of risk. One of the most important ways to increase probability to face financial distress is too high debt to equity relation. The paper illustrates the relationship between debt and equity in 1,560 Polish non-profit entities. The model which can fix optimal capital structure for a non-profit organisation in its current environment was delivered. The proposal of the paper includes a model which helps to find the optimal level of debt for non-profit organisation environmental conditions. The novelty of the model is based on the full costs of debt financing non-profit entities in the context of donor expectations, which in the Polish social and economic environment means that costs indirectly linked with the realisation of the main aim of the social entity cannot be higher than 10 % of the collected money sources. An additional point of our findings is that in comparison with the current state, Polish non-profit organisations need to improve their way of fixing capital structure.