The user’s experience of his or her interaction with a product is becoming an increasingly important aspect of product design. In the ‘experience economy’, experiential factors have become major discriminants affecting the success of new products. Industry is well aware of this, and likewise design schools are adjusting their curricula to better train their students to take into account factors...

This review evaluates the medical literature for religious rituals or ceremonies that have been reported to cause infection. These include an ultra-orthodox Jewish circumcision practice known as metzitzah b'peh, the Christian common communion chalice, Islamic ritual ablution, and the Hindu 'side-roll'. Infections associated with participation in the Islamic Hajj have been extensively reviewed a...

This paper examines the relationship between architecture and civil participation by specifically looking at the formal attributes of Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, its development as a public urban space, its nationally symbolic meaning, and its civic role. A major conclusion of this study is that public assembly and the physical space in which it occurs are indivisible, revealing architecture’s un...

Many cultures around the world observe specific postpartum rituals to avoid ill health in later years. This qualitative systematic review examined the literature describing traditional postpartum practices from 51 studies in over 20 different countries. Commonalities were identified in practices across cultures. Specifically, the themes included organized support for the mother, periods of rest...

From public speaking to first dates, people frequently experience performance anxiety. And when experienced immediately before or during performance, anxiety harms performance. Across a series of experiments, we explore the efficacy of a common strategy that people employ to cope with performance-induced anxiety: rituals. We define a ritual as a predefined sequence of symbolic actions often cha...

The difficulties with interfaith dialogue are linked, at least in part, to the lack of ritual forms (consisting of rules, ceremonial idioms, liturgy, and repertoires of action) designed to unite and integrate the meta-group formed by the various religious communities. By means of ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina the author studied the mechanisms with which, under particular...

It has been proposed that costly rituals act as honest signals of commitment to group beliefs when such rituals appear dysphoric and unappealing (costly) to non-believers, but appealing to true believers (Irons, 2001). If only true believers are willing to endure ritual behaviors and true belief also entails belief in altruistic cooperation, associating with other ritual practitioners can help ...

Four cases of solar retinopathy due to sun gazing during religious rituals are reported. All four patients suffered irreversible visual loss.

Repetitive and ritualistic behaviours (RRBs) are a feature of both typical and atypical development. While the cognitive correlates of these behaviours have been investigated in some neurodevelopmental conditions these links remain largely unexplored in typical development. The current study examined the relationship between RRBs and executive functions (EF) in a sample of typically developing ...