We are delighted to share that two members of the LEVYNA team have recently received major awards recognizing their outstanding research.
At this year's Dies Academicus ceremony, Jana Nenadalová was awarded the Rector's Award of Masaryk University, one of the university's highest distinctions for exceptional academic achievement.
Jana was awarded for her dissertation On the Role of Sensory Deprivation, Social Seclusion, and Authority in the Formation of Religious Experience. The work offers an innovative contribution to the study of religious experience and human perception, focusing on why people in certain religious or spiritual contexts experience contact with deities, spirits, or guides as real. A key concept in the dissertation is the “feeling of presence” - the sense that another being is nearby. The dissertation is based on two empirical studies: one qualitative study on psychological and experiential aspects of “dark therapy,” and one experimental study showing that darkness and silence alone can induce a feeling of another presence, with uncertainty playing a central role in this effect.
Feryl Badiani has been awarded the 2026 Richerson Award by the Cultural Evolution Society. Named after pioneering cultural evolution researcher Peter Richerson, the award recognizes the most outstanding recent doctoral dissertation in the field of cultural evolution.
Feryl received the award for her dissertation The Puzzle of Hinduism: Understanding How Hinduism Boosts the Evolutionary Fitness of Different Linguistic Communities in India. Her work examines the relationship between religion, cultural diversity, and social adaptation, investigating how Hindu traditions contribute to the success and persistence of different linguistic communities across India. By combining insights from cultural evolution, anthropology, and the study of religion, the dissertation offers a novel perspective on one of the world's largest and most diverse religious traditions.
We are incredibly proud of both Jana and Feryl and congratulate them on this well-deserved recognition.
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.
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.
