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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 ...

This thesis is about the discovery of structural similarities across narrative texts. We will describe a method that is based on event alignments created automatically on automatically preprocessed texts. This opens up a path to large-scale empirical research on structural similarities across texts. Structural similarities are of interest for many areas in the humanities and social sciences. We...

Comorbidity is known to occur among various psychiatric disorders. About the third of the patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder have major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder but coexistence of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with mania is rare to see. Here we report a case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where manic phase was accompanied by obsessions of contamination and pathologica...

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 systematically under the guidance of a clinician. The method seems well suited for use by general p...

In this paper I will introduce a vernacular emblem, a copper peacock with an open tail which resembles the form of hand and a tiny miniature sculpture of lion, adjacent to the peacock feet. This sacred Shi’it item consists of symbols which have always been presented during Muharram rituals, conveying a number of iconography connotations. Comparison this figure with other&nb...

This paper is a brief survey of the role of temples and holy places in nurturing the surrounding flora and its habitat. Eightysix kinds of plants in temple yards and gardens of orissa have been enlisted where they are cultivated and preserved for different temple rituals. These plants are seen rarely in wild but are saved from extinction by their association with temple rituals and ceremonies.

When the work and reputation of scientists suffer ritual degradation, a range of tactics can be deployed to resist and rework the psychological and social impacts. Five key resistance tactics to degradation in science are revealing degradation rituals, redeeming the reputation of the targeted scientist, reframing the degradation as unfair, redirecting attention to other domains, and refusing to...