It's a well established recommendation for publications containing masses of continuous text to use hyphenation.
Nope.
It's a well established recommendation for publications on paper containing masses of continuous text to use hyphenation. Even on paper you will find a bunch of style guides that recommend against it.
Remember that the one of the reasons hyphenation is recommended for paper is because it takes up less physical space, and from historical limitations of movable type presses. For paper this is a real issue of cost / physical limits. Things that don't apply as much to online work.
I've read research (unfortunately a Google fails to find it) that says that a small majority prefer hyphenated text for long passages, but I've not read anything that says it actually helps general readability. I've certainly had anecdotal reports from folk who don't have english as a first language that hyphenation makes it harder for them (but to counter that there has been research that inter-syllable hyphenation makes it easier for folk with dyslexia).
It also depends quite a bit on language. For example German's long words make hyphenation a necessity in more situations.
So — the short answer is that I'm not aware of any research that will give you guidance on hyphenation for non-body copy UI elements.
My hunch would be that they'd tend to be less effective. UI text tends to be smaller, so you'd lose the 'word shape' if the text was hyphenated making it harder to scan for. But that's a guess, and I can imagine instances where it might be the best option.
Because of the varied ways text can be presented in UI elements I suspect generally useful advice is probably impossible. If you think it will help try testing it with some users ;-)