1 Jun Two LEVYNA Team Members Receive Prestigious Awards We are delighted to share that two members of the LEVYNA team have recently received major awards recognizing their outstanding research.
21 May New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive computations underlying ritual performance and persistence In a new paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Martin Lang, Khatereh Borhani, Alexandra Ružičková, Eva Kundtová Klocová, and Radim Chvaja propose that ritual performance and persistence can be understood through reinforcement learning.
8 May New study examines how the war in Ukraine shaped religiosity beyond the conflict zone In a new study led by Radim Chvaja in cooperation with LEVYNA's Martin Lang, we examined how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected religiosity in neighbouring European societies.
30 Apr New paper in iScience explores when costly signals of commitment are reliable In a new paper published in iScience, the LEVYNA team examined whether reliable commitment signaling is driven primarily by intuitive processes or by deliberative cost-benefit reasoning.
22 Apr New study examines whether material security predicts belief in God later in life In a new study published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, and let by a LEVYNA researcher, we examine a central prediction of secularization theory: that greater material security should be associated with lower religiosity.
20 Jan Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity Recent article in journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, where LEVYNA members contributed data, asks whether religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events.
18 Dec 2025 Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience A recently published qualitative study by Jana Nenadalová explores Dark therapy, an alternative spiritual practice combining prolonged sensory deprivation with guidance from an authority figure, to understand how religious and spiritual experiences are induced. Drawing on predictive processing theory, the research shows that complete darkness can trigger intense psychological and perceptual phenomena, especially when participants feel a sense of control and bring expectations or prior beliefs into the experience.
10 Nov 2025 Estimated Costs and Benefits of Extreme Rituals in Mauritius Why do people willingly engage in painful or exhausting rituals with no obvious material reward?
