Martin Hůla

Charles University in Prague | CUNI · Department of Philosophy and History of Science

Objectives Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a burning social issue worldwide. Some authorities and organizations have pointed to an even greater increase in the incidence of IPV during the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly because of the restrictive social measures. This study provides data about the incidence of IPV and its associated factors during the...

Objectives Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a burning social issue worldwide. Some authorities and organizations have pointed to an even greater increase in the incidence of IPV during the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly because of the restrictive social measures. This study provides data about the incidence of IPV and its associated factors during the...

Forest environments have been proven beneficial for physiological well-being, supporting relaxation and meditative processes. Unfortunately, some groups, predominantly those with reduced mobility, are prevented from forest visitation. Presenting such environments in virtual reality could provide a viable substitute. However, as forest structure and...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a burning social issue worldwide. According to global statistics, the incidence of IPV has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic due to restrictive measures (e.g., reduced social contacts, the need to stay at home often with a perpetrator in the same household). This study aims to provide data about the incidence...

Although the aesthetic appreciation of flowers is a well-known aspect of human behaviour, theories explaining its origin are missing. The only exception is the evolutionary theory of Heerwagen and Orians. Surprisingly, it has not yet been empirically tested. The authors suggest that humans aesthetically respond to flowers because they signal food a...

Maintenance of genetic polymorphism remains one of the big questions of evolutionary biology, which for a long time tended to be explained by balancing selection. This explanation was later criticized, but now is again accepted as an important mechanism in evolution. Human blood group systems seem affected by balancing selection especially strongly...

Although the aesthetic appreciation of flowers is a well-known aspect of human behavior, theories explaining its origin are missing. An exception is the evolutionary theory of Heerwagen and Orians, who suggest that humans emotionally respond to flowers because they signal food availability. However, fruits are stronger and more direct signals of fo...

Backgrounds The prevalence of toxoplasmosis is higher in schizophrenics than in the general population. It has been suggested that certain symptoms of schizophrenia, including changes in olfactory functions, are in fact symptoms of toxoplasmosis that can be easily detected in schizophrenics only due to the increased prevalence of toxoplasmosis in t...

The beauty of flowers has long been appreciated by humans. Surprisingly, we have very limited knowledge of preferred floral traits and almost no empirical evidence for theories explaining the preference of flowers. The aim of this study was to identify the relative importance of floral color and shape properties on the rating of beauty of flowers a...

Some instances of rape are marked by attacking stranger victims without any preparatory erotic interaction. It points to a possibility, that this type of rape is a strategy to avoid female pre-coital erotic signals. We hypothesized, that showing a female naked body and accessible genitalia in the context of her flirtatious and/or lustful behaviour...

Discussion and conclusions: Our hypotheses were partly proved valid; rapists failed to deactivate prefrontal inhibitive ("control") areas in response to strongly seductive female sexual behaviour. However, they did not show significant differences in brain activation in response to coy flirtatious behaviour, which might mean that a "block" pertains...

The prevalence of toxoplasmosis is higher in schizophrenics than in the general population. It has been suggested that certain symptoms of schizophrenia, including changes in olfactory functions, are in fact symptoms of toxoplasmosis that can be easily detected in schizophrenics only due to the increased prevalence of toxoplasmosis in this populati...

During recent years, scientific knowledge of the human evolution has been significantly modified. This study focuses upon Czech high school student’s knowledge, understanding and attitude about human evolution and aimed at the improvement of the teaching of this issue. We collected data from 91 participants (final year high school students one mont...

This poster summarizes the preliminary results of our research, which describes, how individual differences between people (such as age, level of expertise, etc.) influence their rating of flower beauty. We used an online questionnaire with 52 photographs of flowers of diverse shapes and colors (serving as the stimuli). We collected data from 2013...

There is no doubt that people find flowers beautiful. Surprisingly, we know very little about the actual properties which make flowers so appealing to humans. Although the evolutionary aesthetics provides some theories concerning generally preferred flower traits, empirical evidence is largely missing. In this study, we used an online survey in whi...

There is no doubt that people find flowers beautiful. Surprisingly, we know very little about the actual properties which make flowers so appealing to humans. Although evolutionary aesthetics provides some theories concerning generally preferred flower traits, empirical evidence is largely missing. In this study, we used an online survey in which r...

This study focuses upon the attitudes of Czech biology teachers towards the teaching of human evolution. According to external studies this topic is one of the most controversial in evolutionary biology. The questionnaire was used to collect data. In total 106 teachers filled up our questionnaire. Our respondents, both believers and nonbelievers, d...