Modeling nationalism, religiosity, and threat perception: During the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rise of nationalism and populism in Europe has created significant political and policy challenges. Understanding and addressing these challenges will require attention to the psychological mechanisms and social dynamics that have engendered and promoted these societal shifts. This article presents the results of two new empirical studies that attempt to shed light on the relationships between nationalism, religiosity, national and religious identification, threat perception, and sentiment toward different groups.

Paramilitaries, parochialism, and peace: The moral foundations and personality traits of Slovenskí Branci.

Paramilitary organizations have increasingly become a cause for concern among policy makers and the media in recent years, in part because the former are often seen as a potential threat to peace (or at least to the status quo of the current political systems) in the countries in which they emerge. Organizations such as the Oathkeepers and 3 Percenters (also known as III%ers) in the United States have grown significantly in the last two decades, while paramilitary organizations playing a key role in both offensive and defensive actions in Crimea and the Donbas Region have become a focus of discussion in the Russian war on Ukraine. Although they have not always garnered as much attention, paramilitary organizations in Central and Eastern Europe have a long history.

Minding morality: ethical artificial societies for public policy modeling.

Public policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in human life and central to many public policy challenges.

Dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity among Christians and the religiously unaffiliated: A cross-cultural analysis based on the International Social Survey Programme.

We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invariance properties, we labeled the three resulting factors as "Beliefs in afterlife and miracles", "Belief and importance of God" and "Religious involvement.

A potential explanation for self-radicalisation.

We believe that Whitehouse's model could be extended in a way that can help us make sense of self-radicalised individuals who are not active in cliques. We believe that conceptual ties may be important to this process and present a brief analysis of a database collected by the national consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), to suggest future research to complement Whitehouse's proposal.

[Parameters of the function of cell distribution by size as related to the study of the mechanism of cell growth].

Distribution function of bacteria-rods according to their sizes is calculated assuming linear growth of cells between the divisions and step-like function of division (the division rate equals zero up to the moment when the cell reaches certain length L, then it has constant value A). An approximate analytical expression for the distribution function is obtained; the parameter L and A are calculated from the condition of best coincidence between the theoretical and experimental curves determined by I. A.