The study had two main goals: Firstly, the authors aimed to verify the validity and reliability of the Slovak adaptation of the Coronavirus Anxiety Scale. Secondly, the authors examined the associations between the CAS and mental health indicators – depression, insomnia and generalized anxiety disorder. The representative sample consisted of 1625 Slovak participants from the general population. The data were collected in October 2020. The data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple hierarchical regression analysis. The authors confirmed that (...) the psychometric properties of the CAS were adequate. Furthermore, they identified predictors of depression, generalized anxiety disorder and insomnia. The results may contribute to our understanding of the pandemic’s impact on mental health. (shrink)

Continual pressure on managers, their efficiency, and the need to search for novel solutions to problems can lead to psychologically demanding situations. In efforts to understand the main obstacles to work and to effectively manage work-related processes, and in the need to achieve personal development, new approaches that are based on existential philosophies emerge. The aim of this article is to highlight the ways in which existential approaches have been used or discussed in management and to show that existential themes (...) and their applications in management can also be found in the Eastern tradition of thought. The paper presents six case vignettes from management practice that use Western and Eastern existential insights and offer recommendations for self-development of managers. The paper concludes that although it is difficult or impossible to create a unified framework of existential philosophy of management because of the diversity of existential approaches and because of the problematic nature of comparing Eastern and Western philosophies, it is possible to work towards gathering applicable insights and values. (shrink)

By conceptualizing Sexual Selection, Darwin showed a way to analyze intra-specific individual differences within an evolutionary perspective. Interestingly, Sexual Selection is often used to investigate the origins of sports, arts, humor, religion and other phenomena that, in several languages, are simply called “play.” Despite their manifested differences, these phenomena rely on shared psychological processes, including playfulness. Further, in such behaviors there is usually considerable individual variability, including sex differences, and positive relationship with mating success. However, Sexual Selection is rarely applied (...) in the study of play, with exception to what is concerned as infant training behavior for adult sex roles. We offer an integrated grounding of playful phenomena aligning evolutionary propositions based on sexual selection, which might stimulate further exploration of playfulness within evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

In a study of three indigenous and non-indigenous cultural groups in northwestern and northeastern Siberia, framed line tests and a landscape drawing task were used to examine the hypotheses that test-based assessments of context sensitivity and independence are correlated with the amount of contextual information contained in drawings, and with the order in which the focal and background objects are drawn. The results supported these hypotheses, and inspection of the regression relationships suggested that the intergroup variations in test performance were (...) likely to result from differences in the attention accorded to contextual information, as revealed by the drawings. Social and environmental explanations for the group differences in context sensitivity are also discussed. The conclusions support the argument that cultural differences in artistic styles and perceptual tests reflect the same underlying perceptual tendencies, and they are consistent with the argument that these tendencies reflect corresponding differences in patterns of social and environmental interaction. (shrink)

"Our starting point is a phenomenological analysis of the concepts of hand and possibility in relation to human realization and expression, whereby the problem of hand and its movements can be followed in this framework in its peculiarity and uniqueness. With regard to possibility, we follow a certain shift in Husserl’s concept of possibility towards practical possibility, as well as some selected passages in his texts concerning corporeality and constitution. This phenomenological starting point is connected to the question of stimulation (...) (potentiating) of the hand in the creative process; we draw upon insights in texts of a Finnish thinker and architect Juhani Pallasmaa and on examples from fields of art, technology and handicrafts. The goal of the text is the return to the hand and the revival of the sphere of original realization of the man, as opposed to uniformity, excess of impulses, tendency to manipulate or, on the other hand, desensitization, whereby we want to open up a space for stimulation of creativity and deepening of the experience on this basis, whose starting poin Keywords: body, touch, possibility, creation, craft, Edmund Husserl, Juhani Pallasmaa ". (shrink)

There are more forms of intersubjectivity or more ways of how we experience the overlaps of our subjectivity to the other, to the alter in his different forms. The paper focuses on some selected aspects of this problem, which are related to the phenomenological reduction and situated at the intersection point of two theses: Subjectivity is intersubjectivity; Intersubjectivity is subjectivity. The discussion is based on selected texts of Edmund Husserl and Natalie Depraz.

The aim of the paper is twofold: first, to enrich the factual historical record of the phenomenological movement in the second half of the 20th century in a Central European context by presenting two representatives of this movement who are now relatively unknown in the Czechoslovak philosophical milieu (Marie Bayerová and Josef Cibulka). The genealogy of this stream of phenomenology has been shaped by the difficult conditions under which philosophy was conducted. The second aim is to use the genealogy to (...) describe the type of phenomenology that developed in this milieu. The article considers minor figures in the phenomenological movement, by exploring philosophy, both “in margine” and from the centre. It also consider the concept of “state of emergency”. Taking these pointers of philosophical analysis (elaborated by Jan Patočka and Milan Šimečka in their time) we reveal the anthropological conditions of philosophizing and the type of phenomenology. (shrink)

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens more (...) opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

Since Darwin proposed that human musicality evolved through sexual selection, empirical evidence has supported intersexual selection as one of the adaptive functions of artistic propensities. However, intrasexual competition has been overlooked. We tested their relative importance by investigating the relationship between the self-perceived talent/expertise in 16 artistic and 2 sports modalities and proxies of intersexual selection and intrasexual competition in heterosexuals. Participants were 82 Brazilian men, 166 Brazilian women, 146 Czech men, and 458 Czech women. Factor analysis revealed five factors: (...) Literary-arts, Visual-arts, Musical-arts, Circus-arts, and Sports. Multivariate General Linear Model showed more associations of the arts to intersexual selection in women and to intrasexual selection in men, and overall more relationships in women than in men. In women, literary and musical-arts were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selections proxies, visual and circus-arts were related to elevated intersexual selection proxies, and sports were related to intrasexual selection proxies. In men, literary-arts and sports were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selection proxies, musical-arts were related to intrasexual proxies, and circus-arts were related to intersexual proxies; visual-arts did not have predictors. Although present in both sexes, each sexual selection component has different relative importance in each sex. Artisticality functions to attract and maintain long/short-term partners, and to compete with mating rivals. (shrink)

Jaroslav Peregrin, Člověk v zrcadle teorie her: Jak nám matematika a filozofie pomáhají zjišťovat, co jsme zač, Praha: Dokořán, 2021, 119 s., ISBN 978-80-7675-012-8.

Text se formou polemiky zabývá otázkou, zda je možné rozřešit filozofický spor mezi realismem a konstruktivismem. Oproti mínění Jaroslava Peregrina hájí autor tezi, že tento spor rozřešit lze, a to ve prospěch realismu. Argumenty pro realismus jsou výrazně přesvědčivější, zatímco konstruktivistické argumenty nejsou ničím podložené a zároveň vedou k absurdním důsledkům. The text adresses, in a polemical fashion, the question whether the philosophical dispute between realism and constructivism can be resolved. Against the opinion of Jaroslav Peregrin, the author defends (...) the thesis that this dispute can be resolved, in favor of realism. The arguments for realism are much more convincing, while constructivist arguments are baseless and at the same time lead to absurd consequences. (shrink)