Autobiographical memory is memory on personal experience which has an important meaning to self. That includes not only information about self but also episodic information on time and place of events (Conway& Pleydell-Pearce,2000). In order to make clear the relationship between autobiographical memory and self in Japanese young people, we examined emotional and constructive aspects of autobiographical memory, using cued-recall method with event-category words. The results showed that emotional and constructive contents were different among five types of events. First of all, the feelings about “School events” tended to change from negative to positive ones over time. Second, young people recalled ”Failure events” more often than the others. Third, they tended to feel more gratitude toward“Success/achievement events” than to the others. The findings may indicate that young people regard these event(“School events”, “Failure events” and “Success/achievement events”) more important to themselves than the other types of events.

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We examined the effects of negative (anger, sadness, and disgust) and positive (happiness) stimuli on face recognition (Study 1). On the basis of these results, in study 2, we examined dysfunctional memory processing of facial expressions in relation to alexithymia. In study 1, we adopted the flicker paradigm composed of change-detection and memory tasks. The results showed that negative face advantage was observed in the change-detection task, whereas the positive face advantage was observed in the memory task. In study 2, we used a visual search and change-detection tasks. The results showed that we found individual differences only in the change-detection task, suggesting that individuals with high alexithymia showed lower sensitivity for the happy faces compared to the angry faces. We assumed that individuals with high alexithymia show specific impairment in memory processes related to happy but not to angry faces.

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To discuss the development of driving-assistance systems and enhancement of driving ability, we investigated stimulus-response behavior among elderly people by using the driving aptitude test. Participants were 100 drivers and were assigned to 3 groups based on age: 50s, 60s, and over 70. All participants provided informed consent and performed several cognitive tests and the driving aptitude test including 7 kinds of tests similar to those in the Lecture for Elderly Drivers in Japan. Analyses of response times and accuracy obtained from 4 of the 7 tests showed that participants in the 60s and over-70 groups delayed their responses when they were required to discriminate among various signals and respond using the foot pedal; and showed decreased performance under the blue-signal condition. The results helped determine elderly drivers’ stimulus-response behavior from the driving aptitude test data and indicated a factor-induced performance decrease during driving.

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  The current study investigated the cultural difference between American and Korean in reading other’s mind depending on the consistency of the emotional expression and the behavior. Participants played the prisoner’s dilemma game with a computer to get as many points as possible. The characteristic of the computer was set as a defector. In the consistent condition, computer showed a joyful face after winning lots of points and a regretful face after winning little points, and in the inconsistent condition, computer showed emotional expression vice versa. We found that participants in the inconsistent condition were more cooperative to the opponent than participants in the consistent condition, but this was only true for American group. Korean did not show the difference on cooperation rate depending on the consistency condition. This finding suggests that American is more susceptible to other’s emotional expression at the moment rather than other’s behavior as compared with Korean. 

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Some of recent studies have been focused on cognitive task performances affected by emotion and motivation. In this study, we hypothesized that emphasis of errors may improve older adults’ cognitive task performances, based on the regulatory fit hypothesis (Maddox & Markman, 2010), because older adults’ motivation were observed to shift from promotion focus to prevention focus (Ebner, Freud & Baltes, 2006). We used our new-breakfast-task (Harada & Okawa, 2014), which demanded to a participant cook 3 kinds of foods for multiple guests, and compared performances between the GAIN task group (gaining bonus for their works), the LOSS task group (losing rewards in accordance to their errors), and the CONTROL group (no reward conditions instructed). Results showed that one type of errors decreased in older adults in the LOSS task group, however other kinds of errors were not changed even though those errors were related to the tasks which needs cognitive flexibility. It is necessary to investigate the mechanism under effects of “regulatory fit”.

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Uchida & Nakaune (2004) investigated the influence of utterance speed and pitch on personality impression. However, Uchida et al. (2004) did not limit the speaker’s sex and utterance context. The present study examined the influence of utterance speed and pitch in female first-time self-introductions on impression formation and whether personality impression can be estimated from voice impression (impression of the speaker’s voice and her condition). The experiment was a 3-factor mixed design with listener’s sex (male, female), utterance speed (fast, normal, slow), and pitch (high, mid, low) as independent variables. Results indicated that utterance speed and pitch have independent influences on impression formation in female first-time self-introductions, and that personality impression can be estimated from voice impression. In particular, Extroversion and Openness to Experience can be readily estimated from voice impression, while Conscientiousness cannot.

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"Beauty", "attractiveness", and "likeability" are used as the evaluation items of the face. However, these evaluation items have not been investigated well about whether those are used as having the different or the same meaning. In this paper, 19 participants evaluated the 3 items about the 12 famous person's imaged faces. Analysis using the mean of the rating showed that there was no difference between beauty and attractiveness. On the other hand, the difference among the 3 items was investigated about each participant. As the result, the rate of concordance was 40% even in the case of the maximum rating. It was revealed that three items had used as different meanings. In addition, the correlation between attractiveness and likeability was higher than that of the others.

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The present study examined how differences in resolution (4K and HD imaging) influence subjective impressions of movies in association with movie contents (natural/artificial objects) and fields of view (wide/medium/narrow) (Exp1). We also investigated the effects of the quantities of motion with the flame rate higher (59.94fps) than the previous study (23.98 fps) (Exp2). We found that 4K movies, as compared to HD movies, induced stronger impressions regarding evaluation and comfort especially when they were presented with natural scene and/or larger field of view. It was also shown that 4K movies induced stronger impressions regarding desirability and comfort regardless of motion quantities, contrary to the previous finding that 4K movies with the larger quantities of motion gave observer lower impression regarding desirability and comfort. These results suggest that there exist some desirable conditions under which the ultra high definition imaging could effectively enhance observers’ subjective impressions of movies. 

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We can find a variety of tea packaging designs on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles in daily life. Although there have been much recent research into the influence of because package design on consumer purchasing preference, this study is the first to examine the impact of Japanese fonts on preferences for tea packaging. In this experiment, the effects of 4 kinds of Japanese font on aesthetic impressions of tea beverage package designs on similarly shaped PET bottles were tested. The experiment used 20 pictures combining 4 kinds of font and required 34 participants to rate each according to aesthetic impressions (Balance, Harmony, Beauty, and Preference) on a 7-point Likert scale. Results showed that package designs using HG Kyokasho-tai were rated significantly higher than other fonts. In conclusion, these results indicate that using HG Kyokasho-tai for package designs may be effective for tea beverages in PET bottles.

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