Investigation on Anxieties while Using the Internet to Study about “Anshin”

Abstract

“Anshin” is an emotion in Japanese that is difficult to translate because it is vague, varies from person to person, and is subjective. It means something like “a feeling of contentment”. The demand for Internet use with “Anshin” is high. We believe that the emotion and the demand could be universal. To study “Anshin, ” we conducted group interviews as our first step. We obtained 95/157 cases of “Anshin”/anxiety from 28 people. From the results, we found that studying anxiety is valuable. Anxiety is a kind of opposite concept to “Anshin” and controlling it leads to a kind of “Anshin.” To discuss this, we constructed a model of the process of anxiety generation and selected candidates for the related elements. After investigating obtained cases, we produced a questionnaire for Internet anxieties to prepare the evaluation of them.