In Vivo versus Augmented Reality Exposure in the Treatment of Small Animal Phobia: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Although in vivo exposure is the treatment of choice for specific phobias, some acceptability problems have been associated with it. Virtual Reality exposure has been shown to be as effective as in vivo exposure, and it is widely accepted for the treatment of specific phobias, but only preliminary data are available in the literature about the efficacy of Augmented Reality. The purpose of the present study was to examine the efficacy and acceptance of two treatment conditions for specific phobias in which the exposure component was applied in different ways: In vivo exposure (N = 31) versus an Augmented Reality system (N = 32) in a randomized controlled trial. “One-session treatment” guidelines were followed. Participants in the Augmented Reality condition significantly improved on all the outcome measures at post-treatment and follow-ups. When the two treatment conditions were compared, some differences were found at post-treatment, favoring the participants who received in vivo exposure. However, these differences disappeared at the 3- and 6-month follow-ups. Regarding participants’ expectations and satisfaction with the treatment, very positive ratings were reported in both conditions. In addition, participants from in vivo exposure condition considered the treatment more useful for their problem whereas participants from Augmented Reality exposure considered the treatment less aversive. Results obtained in this study indicate that Augmented Reality exposure is an effective treatment for specific phobias and well accepted by the participants.     

The Practitioner and School Age Child Problems

The extraordinary plasticity of the growing child offers the general practitioner an unusual opportunity to intervene either in a preventative or therapeutic manner. Such intervention, properly the task of any informed physician dealing with families, can alter unhealthy growth to healthier development. The whole child is just as important as his medical illnesses; the whole family usually needs help when there is an emotional disturbance in any child.Common problems that lend themselves readily to physician intervention are behavior disorders accompanying a neurological deficit, conduct disorders, enuresis and school phobias. Knowing how to elicit information, to evaluate clinical data and to utilize the findings of a skilled psychologist, and when to refer to a psychiatrist, plus a thorough knowledge of community resources are part and parcel of a physician''s equipment for dealing with children and families.     

Ritual, Risk, and Danger: Chain Prayers in Fiji

Rituals that defuse immediate senses of danger can perpetuate senses of powerlessness. Ambiguous language used in defensive rituals can heighten people's senses of the risks they are confronting and also compel people to perform those rituals again in the future. In this article, I illustrate this argument by examining Fijian Methodist masu sema (chain prayers), which are conducted to defuse the dangers that beset society, including curses from demonic ancestors. I argue that Fijian cultural themes of present-day human powerlessness are generated largely by competition between Methodist and chiefly authorities. "Chain prayers" are attempts to negate the power of dangerous ancestors, but in requesting God's help, ritual participants cast themselves as powerless. Verbal ambiguity in chain prayers gives "demons" lives of their own, compelling their future circulation.     

The consumption of ritual and the changing values of filial piety in ancestor worship

Ancestor worship is regarded as the key element of the Han people's belief system across most of China. However, the rituals pertaining to death, such as in funerals and annual ancestor worship, vary from place to place. For decades, the state has made tremendous efforts to reform and standardise funerals consistent with its path to modernization by insisting on more socialist practices rather than those that are perceived as ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’, such as burning paper and incense or performing rituals. I argue that despite regulating the use of funeral materials or memorial types, the state has failed to reform the essence of death rituals, that is, the duty of filial piety and people's conception of the afterlife. In addition, funerals and other rituals related to death contribute to individual's social reputation.     

Face to face: meaning, feeling and perception in Amazonian welcoming ceremonies

Some welcoming ceremonies practised by indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been considered events that enable the establishment of a social link between potential enemies. The studies do not, however, indicate how the shift from latent hostility to a social relationship occurs. They only refer to the 'magical act' produced through the significant exchange during the dialogues that take place at the key moment of the ceremony. Examining the perceptual interaction of the Candoshi welcoming ceremony and not merely the text of the dialogue, this article attempts to incorporate into the analysis the intensity of the affective dimension which governs these rituals, which can help to explain how such rituals provide the participants with the confidence to initiate a social relationship.     

A contribution to the interpretation of immunological survey records

In certain infection types the use of official immunological survey figures expressed mathematically by means of exponential distribution or its distributional function may help assess the epidemiological trends in herd immunity levels. This approach to the evaluation of immunological survey records is primarily well applicable to infections that are uniform in exposure pattern, affect the entire population, and result in life-long immunity. The parameters characterizing the rise in the level of herd immunity can be determined by means of negative exponential regression. Applied to selected immunological survey data this essentially simple catalytic model of investigation may provide reliable information on the actual state of immunity in the general population, and may also help estimate its dynamics in the retrospect.     

Ritual responses to drought: An examination of ritual expressions in Classic Maya written sources

Planting and rain-beckoning rituals are an extremely common way in which past and present human communities have confronted the risk of drought across a range of environments worldwide. In tropical environments, such ceremonies are particularly salient despite widespread assumptions that water supplies are unproblematic in such regions. We demonstrate for the first time that two common but previously under-appreciated Maya rituals are likely planting and rain-beckoning rituals preferentially performed at certain times of the year in close step with the rainy season and the Maya agricultural cycle. We also argue for considerable historical continuity between these Classic Maya ceremonies and later Maya community rituals still performed in times of uncertain weather conditions up to the present day across Guatemala, Belize, and eastern Mexico. During the Terminal Classic period (AD 800-900), the changing role played by ancient Maya drought-related rituals fits into a wider rhetorical shift observed in Maya texts away from the more characteristic focus on royal births, enthronements, marriages, and wars towards greater emphasis on the correct perpetuation of key ceremonies, and we argue that such changes are consistent with palaeoclimatic evidence for a period of diminished precipitation and recurrent drought.     

Prolonged Exposure: a Rapid Treatment for Phobias

Ten adult patients with long-standing specific phobias were treated by prolonged continuous exposure to their phobic objects in fantasy and reality without avoidance. All patients were greatly helped by four to five hours'' treatment in two or three sessions, and all improved more after practice than after imaginal sessions. The treatment method is more economical and efficient than other methods described so far.     

A controlled study of Tourette syndrome. III. Phobias and panic attacks.

Comparison was made of the frequency of phobias and panic attacks in normal controls and in patients with Tourette syndrome (TS), attention-deficit disorder (ADD), and ADD secondary to a TS gene. For phobias the most significant difference between controls and TS patients was with respect to fear of public transportation (P = .002), followed by fear of being alone (P = .009), fear of being in a crowd (P = .01), fear of being in water (P = .025), fear of animals (P = .04), fear of public speaking (P = .05), and other fears (P = .05). Only 8.5% of controls had more than three simple phobias and none had more than five, whereas 26% of TS patients had more than three (P = .008) and some had as many as 13. As opposed to 19% of TS patients, none of the controls had phobias that interfered with their life (P = .001). Among female TS patients 55.1% had 3-13 phobias, compared with 8.7% of the female controls (P less than .0005). There was no correlation between the ADD score and the number of phobias (r = -.010) and little correlation with the total number of tics (r = .14). Panic attacks were present in 8.3% of the controls and 33% of the TS patients (P = .0008). This frequency increased to 55.2% (P less than .0005) for grade 3 (severe) TS patients. None of the controls, 15.9% of all TS patients (P = .002), and 31% of grade 3 TS patients (P less than .0005) had more than three panic attacks in 1 wk. Total panic-symptom score (12 possible symptoms) was significantly greater than that in the controls in all grades of TS. The presence or absence of ADD had little effect on the total panic-symptom score, but the presence of ADD resulted in a significantly lower average age at onset of panic attacks (8.8 years) compared with those TS patients without ADD (15.4 years) (P = .03). These observations indicate that phobias and panic attacks are a significant part of the symptomatology of TS and provide the first clear indication that phobias and panic attacks can be due to the presence of a major gene.     

Why People Don't Die 'Naturally' any More: Changing Relations Between 'The Individual' and 'The State' in Post-Socialist Bulgaria

This article explores the theme of death as a means of illuminating the changing relationship between 'the individual' and 'the state' in the context of post-socialist Bulgaria. Previous research carried out on rituals and socialist society indicates a close connection between state ideology and the socially constructed 'natural' order – an order partly reproduced through engagement in state-sponsored life-cycle rituals, such as funerals. By focusing on the way in which funerals are presently carried out, and more specifically on the way in which villagers talk about death, I suggest that new discourse reveals important changes: a reordering of the relationship between 'the individual' and the socially constructed 'natural' order. The state is no longer such a strong mediating force in this relationship. Post-socialist reform, therefore, involves more than 'just' political and economic change; it represents a more general breakdown in the total set of relations that constituted the socialist world.     

Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual

Following the 20th anniversary of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article extrapolates how attention to actual notions of community might redirect his important intervention. It suggests that locally and culturally specific ideas about collectivity shape the experience and expectations of national-level projections. To demonstrate this outcome the analysis focuses on Bulgarian mumming—spectacular winter rituals in which threatening masked figures transverse villages to banish evil and bring good fortune. While these rituals clearly reinforce social solidarity, they represent a local notion of community in which conflict, both intra-and interethnic, is elemental and constitutive. This image of community does not demand consensus or homogeneity when imagined on a national scale. Such variations in community notions may help explain the diversity of national experiences increasingly documented by ethnographers.     

Does women's greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy?

Previous studies with adult humans and nonhuman animals revealed more rapid fear learning for spiders and snakes than for mushrooms and flowers. The current experiments tested whether 11-month-olds show a similar effect in learning associative pairings between facial emotions and fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Consistent with the greater incidence of snake and spider phobias in women, results show that female but not male infants learn rapidly to associate negative facial emotions with fear-relevant stimuli. No difference was found between the sexes for fear-irrelevant stimuli. The results are discussed in relation to fear learning, phobias, and a specialized evolved fear mechanism in humans.     

How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation?

Collective rituals have long puzzled anthropologists, yet little is known about how rituals affect participants. Our study investigated the effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality. We operationalized prosociality as (1) attitudes about fellow ritual participants and (2) decisions in a public goods game. The nine rituals varied in levels of synchrony and levels of sacred attribution. We found that rituals with synchronous body movements were more likely to enhance prosocial attitudes. We also found that rituals judged to be sacred were associated with the largest contributions in the public goods game. Path analysis favored a model in which sacred values mediate the effects of synchronous movements on prosocial behaviors. Our analysis offers the first quantitative evidence for the long-standing anthropological conjecture that rituals orchestrate body motions and sacred values to support prosociality. Our analysis, moreover, adds precision to this old conjecture with evidence of a specific mechanism: ritual synchrony increases perceptions of oneness with others, which increases sacred values to intensify prosocial behaviors.     

Facilitated invasion of an overseas invader: human mediated settlement and expansion of the giant African snail, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Lissachatina fulica</Emphasis>, in Cuba

The giant African snail, Lissachatina fulica, is considered one of the most invasive species worldwide, acting as a crop pest and diseases vector. It was first detected in Cuba in 2014 and is dispersing throughout Havana. We mapped 34 sites in the vicinity of Havana to assess its spread and analysed ecological (forestation and humidity) and anthropogenic (pollution and religious sites) factors in relation to the presence/absence of the snails using multivariate correspondence analysis. There were 14 sites at which the snail was present and where religious rituals of the Yoruba creed, an African rooted religion, were observed. No other variables showed significant relationships. This indicates that the rituals may be a major factor in the dispersal of the snail in Havana and more widely in Cuba. In light of this an outreach program with key Yoruba leaders may help in slowing the dispersal of the snail within Cuba, once the threats posed by this species are known.     

Psychopathologie des phobies

Phobias can apply to anything, from storms to clouds and grasshoppers. Examples of disconcerting behaviours are plentiful in this field. It is therefore impossible to catalogue every phobia, but the most generalized ones are very disabling. They can develop at any age. Nevertheless, people with phobias do not often seek consultation, although effective drug and psychological treatments exist. This article deals, in particular, with behavioural and cognitive mechanisms involved in the acquisition and maintenance of phobias, and their main forms and treatments.     

Commercialization and Use of Snakes in North and Northeastern Brazil: Implications for Conservation and Management

Snakes are sold in many markets and religious article stores in Brazil. Besides their use as food, snakes are exploited in a variety of ways, such as pets, or for use in traditional medicine and magic/religious rituals (especially in Afro-Brazilian religions). Despite widespread commercialization, there is a general lack of information about this snake trade, which makes it difficult to evaluate its magnitude and its impact on reptile populations. This work documents the commercialization and use of snakes in five cities in Northeastern (São Luís, Teresina, João Pessoa and Campina Grande) and Northern (Belém) Brazil, through interviews with 119 merchants of biological products in outdoor markets and religious articles stores. The data was gathered through the use of semi-structured questionnaires, complemented by semi-directed interviews. The products derived from 11 snake species were being commercialized for medicinal or magical/religious purposes. Boa constrictor, Crotalus durissus and Eunectes murinus were the species most commonly sold. The economic importance of snakes as sources of medicines and religious products demonstrates the need for the development of sustainable use programs for these species.     

Annual Rituals of Conflict

Great rituals of conflict—annual celebrations containing episodes of threat, insult, or contention—are widely, though sporadically, distributed worldwide. To account for their incidence, propositions derived from Gluckman's analysis of Southeast African rituals of rebellion are tested crossculturally. Results indicate annual rituals of conflict occur disproportionately among societies situated in environments prone to seasonal hunger and possessing political systems strongly inclined to favor communal over individual decision making. Analysis suggests that such rites originate in a spontaneous reaction to sudden, drastic uptakes of food energy. Further substantive findings bearing on mode and amplitude of collective enactments, combined with theoretical understandings of ritualization, lead to conclusions regarding subsequent cultural development.     

Assessment of personal protective equipment use and occupational exposures in small industries in Jeddah: Health implications for workers

Small-scale industries account for a large proportion of jobs and play a vital role in most countries’ economic growth and prosperity. Due to the very low use of personal protective equipment (PPEs), employees are exposed to numerous physical, chemical, and accidental hazards in small-scale industries. PPEs are very effective in minimizing occupational injuries, accidents, and other hazards which otherwise result in substantial manpower and financial losses. The study objective was to assess the availability and use of PPEs as well as self-reported occupational exposures among workers in surveyed small industries in Jeddah. The study involved 102 workers from 28 small-scale industries (vehicle repair, welding, and paint). A survey was conducted to gather data of socio-demographic characteristics, self-reported occupational exposures, and frequency of PPEs used by workers. The occupational exposures (never exposed, sometimes exposed and always exposed) were reported in percentages including; noise exposure (19.6, 73.5 and 6.9%); dust/smoke exposure (9.8, 69.6 and 20.6%); vapors/fumes exposure (11.8, 60.8 and 27.5%); and direct sunlight (43.1, 56.9 and 0%), respectively. The reported use of different PPEs in descending order was; knee joints mats (50%), welding shields (50%), safety glasses (33.3%), gloves (27.5%), face masks (26.5%), safety shoes (10.8%) and earplugs/ muffs (8.8%). On the basis of this study findings, hand hygiene and general OSH awareness like interventions can be developed which will help in minimizing workplace exposures among small-scale industry workers.     

Alcoholism and pathways to recovery: new survey results on views and treatment options

Almost 19 million Americans require treatment for an "alcohol problem"; however, only 2.4 million have been diagnosed and just 139,000 receive medication to treat it. Chronic heavy drinking contributes to cardiovascular illnesses, liver disease, cancer, and psychiatric disorders. Imaging studies demonstrate structural changes in the human brain with prolonged exposure to alcohol. Alcoholism can thus be described as an acquired brain dysfunction with specific neurochemical and neuroanatomic pathways. There is a need to intervene early because the average age of alcohol experimentation is 11-13 years--delaying onset reduces the rate of alcoholism. A survey sponsored by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) set out to measure the attitudes and misperceptions of 1000 adults from the general population plus 300 physicians and 503 individuals in recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) to better understand approaches toward alcohol treatment. In these surveys, 74% of the general public indicated that alcoholism affects their daily lives, with 41% reporting having to encourage a loved one to seek help for an alcohol problem. The vast majority (= 80%) indicated a stigma toward alcoholics. Denial or refusal to admit severity and fear of social embarrassment were the top 2 reasons for not seeking help. The majority of the general population believes that alcoholism is caused partly by moral weakness. The survey revealed that most Americans are open to medications to treat alcoholism if physician-recommended and if it could reduce alcohol cravings and maintain abstinence. In the past 55 years, only 3 medications (disulfiram, naltrexone, and acamprosate) have been US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved for the treatment of AUD, each with unique mechanisms of action.     

(Re)Creating Rituals through Contemporary Dance

After fieldwork on the ten-hour performance “Insomnia 2–In Memoriam” about rituals and death, the author asks how the deRothfils company makes life meaningful through audience interaction with this dance creation. She explores the notion of ritual for performance analysis, drawing on Catherine Bell’s framework. She examines four dimensions of the performance, each showing how various aspects of ritual are generated: reviving esthetic features, fulfilling social needs through collective encounters, experiencing strong affects, and offering a space for existential reflection. The article concludes with a more general question of how this artistic process produces knowledge.