The current research addresses the psychological benefits of superstitious rituals in top sport, examining the circumstances under which top-class sportspersons are especially committed to enacting rituals prior to a game (ritual commitment). Consistent with the hypotheses, findings revealed that ritual commitment is greater when (a) uncertainty is high rather than low; and (b) importance of th...

Reestablishing feelings of control after experiencing uncertainty has long been considered a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were c...

Do human beings need rituals? Have they become an obsolete “evolutionary appendix” in the modern world, or are they an indispensable part of the human condition? Right at the start, I wish to adopt a clear stance with regard to this repeatedly controversial discussion in ritual studies: From the perspective of cultural anthropology, I assume that human beings need rituals, that they are an anth...

To bracket the importance of the pre-equilibrium stage on relativistic heavy-ion collision observables, we compare simulations where it is modeled by either free-streaming partons or fluid dynamics. These cases implement the assumptions of extremely weak vs. extremely strong coupling in the initial collision stage. Accounting for flow generated in the pre-equilibrium stage, we study the sensiti...

Disabling phobias and phobia like compulsive rituals are surprisingly common in the general population, though only a minority ask for help. Behavioural treatment (exposure) and antidepressants are the most helpful approaches. Most patients can help themselves if they use a self exposure approach systematicaily under the guidance of a clinician. The method seems weli suited for use by general p...

We review and extend recent work on the application of the noncommutative geometric framework to an interpretation of the moduli space of vacua of certain deformations of N = 4 super Yang-Mills theories. We present a simple worldsheet calculation that reproduces the field theory results and sheds some light on the dynamics of the Dbrane bubbles. Different regions of moduli space are associated ...