International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

According to the World Health Organization, smoking is one of the greatest threats to public health. In Bulgaria, this threat is particularly acute, as the country has the highest percentage of smokers and the highest mortality rate due to tobacco use among EU member states. Despite the well-documented health and financial detriments, the question of why people continue to smoke remains partially unresolved. This article proposes a novel psychological theory suggesting that the mild nicotine abstinent symptoms, combined with the initially unpleasant taste of cigarette smoke, create the perfect conditions for the emergence of “emotional illusions.” Emotional illusions, extensively studied in literature, occur when an unconscious external stimulus elicits an emotion, leading the brain to construct an illusory cause for the emotion. In the context of smoking, it is not boredom, nervousness, or stress that triggers the desire to smoke, but rather the mild withdrawal symptoms that the brain misinterprets as these states. The article concludes with preliminary empirical data supporting this hypothesis.

The purpose of this article is to emphasize to the importance of the process of formation of social identity, both in relation to the individual and in relation to the surrounding school and social environment. Тhe modern pedagogical process is characterized by rapidly evolving technological models, teaching aids and tools and with a changing educational space. These factors of the social reality, due to the pandemic situation, determine the formation of the social identity of the students. The present material focuses on the substantive aspect of the concept of social identity and on the factors that influence to its formation. The article implements an integrational and multidisciplinary approach for the purpose of building a scientific construction of the interpretation of the phenomenon of sociall identity and its position in educational scientific systematic apparatus. The process of identity formation is analyzed and interpreted from different scientific perspectives – philosophy, pedagogy and psychology.

The development and use of mathematical models is of great importance not only in the research field, but also in the practical field. Mathematical research in psychology is based on the construction of an image of the studied object or group of objects, fixing the basic properties and relationships. The complexity lies in the heterogeneous nature of individuals, in the diversity of their behavioral characteristics, interests, and features of social behavior. Statistical models can be divided into separate groups; models that consider processes that affect individual behavior at the micro level, that is, at the level of low-level human thinking processes; meso-level models; macro-level models that consider and predict general trends in the behavior of people in a group, for example, in a crowd.

An important task of analyzing the behavior of individuals in society, in a large crowd of people is the development of mathematical models of behavior. The complexity lies in the heterogeneous nature of individuals, in the diversity of their behavioral characteristics, interests, and features of social behavior. Here the possibility of mathematical modeling of crowd behavior is considered and a mathematical model is proposed.

In this article we discuss the success of the program JUMP MATH in primary and secondary school in search for a system of teaching that produces similar results in all school levels of mathematics and possibly in the sciences. We view the program from risk management point of view and from algorithmic perspective. We propose a general frame of teaching mathematics that can be applied from schools to university level with great economic effect if the results are similar like the results of JUMP MATH.