To investigate the mechanisms underlying intentional forgetting, the present study examined therelationship between perceived thought control ability and item-method directed forgetting.Participants were presented with a face, followed by an instruction that asked them to eitherremember or forget the preceding face. In a test, participants took an old/new recognition test offaces. Finally, participants answered questionnaires regarding to perceived thought control ability(TCAQ) and mind wandering (MWQ). The results showed directed forgetting of faces: participantscorrectly recognized more faces with ‘remember’ instruction than faces with ‘forget’ one. We discussthe relationships between individual differences in thought control ability, such as TCAQ andMWQ, and the magnitude of item-method directed forgetting.

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This study primarily intended to reveal prospective memory (PM) mechanisms by focusing on inhibitory functions. Recently, Utsumi & Saito (in press) showed that inhibitory control based on remembering certain information impaired PM remembering when there was little overlap between the processing for the ongoing and PM tasks. However, that inhibition did not impair spontaneous PM remembering when PM cues were focal to the ongoing task. In the current study, we hypothesized that other inhibitory mechanisms, particularly the inhibition of motor responses, would impair the spontaneous event-based PM remembering. To test this, we manipulated the type of PM cues by using a go/no-go manipulation. This manipulation suppressed the detection of no-go stimuli when focal cues were presented during the PM task, but not when nonfocal cues were presented. These results suggested that inhibitory mechanisms differ depending on the cue focality in PM tasks.

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[in Japanese]

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Empathy is an ability to understand intentions of others. However, little is known about the relationship between empathy and face memory. The current study investigated this issue. During encoding, participants were presented with pairs of other's face and sentence describing hypothetical action, and rated empathic feelings for others performing the actions. After the incidental encoding, participants recognized faces learned previously, and judged subjective impressions for the faces. In addition, a personality trait of empathy was evaluated. Results showed that faces to be highly empathized were remembered better than those to be low empathized, and that participants with a trait of high empathy showed higher scores in memory and subjective familiarity for faces than those with low empathy. These findings suggest that memory for others to be empathized could be enhanced by personal familiarity, and that the enhancement could be effective in individuals with a trait of high empathy. 

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Prospective memory refers to a psychological process to remember a planned action or intention at some future point in time, and is modulated by emotion. However, little is known about individual differences in an interaction between emotion and prospective memory. The current study investigated this issue. Participants were presented with 960 pictures in each of ongoing and prospective memory tasks. In the ongoing task, participants made categorical judgment for each picture. In the prospective memory task, participants responded to emotionally negative and neutral target pictures, which were presented by around 44 seconds. Results demonstrated that response times for negative targets in the prospective memory task were significantly slower than those for neutral targets, and the delayed responses were significantly correlated with individual differences of moods. These findings suggest that prospective memories could be inhibited by negative emotion, and that the inhibition could be predicted by individual differences of negative mood.

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Emotional feelings associated with memories for negative events fade earlier than those for positive events. This bias is defined as the fading affect bias (FAB). In the present study, we investigated whether the FAB effects were predicted by individual differences of personality traits or current moods. The FAB effect was measured by autobiographical memories, which were personally recorded in a 14-days dairy. Results demonstrated that the FAB effect identified in this study replicated findings in previous studies, and that variances of the FAB effect were significantly correlated with individual differences in the current mood of negative feelings. However, no significant correlation was found between individual scores of the FAB and the personality trait. These findings suggest that faster decrease of emotional feelings associated with negative events than positive events could be diminished in individuals with negative mood, and that the FAB effect could not be explained by the personality trait.

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To examine personal differences of the use of spatial cues in navigation, we carried out several tests after the presentation of a route movie in a virtual environment. The test asked the landmark and scene memory, the sequential knowledge, and the spatial direction of the presented route. Subjects were divided into two groups based on the score of a subjective spatial ability questionnaire. The results showed the performance in scene recognition was higher in the higher subjective spatial ability group than the lower group. There was no difference in the performance of the tasks that asked the sequential knowledge and the spatial direction between the groups. These results suggest that a person who has high self-rating in spatial abilities shows higher sensitivity to a scene surrounding a landmark whereas there is no difference in the ability related to the spatial mapping.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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  This experiment was conducted to investigate effect of one’s emotional state in regard to impression on others. After twenty college students’ feelings were manipulated by watching movies (positive and negative), they evaluated their impressions of the experimenters by using questionnaire, absent the experimenters. The results showed that the participants with positive feeling evaluated the experimenters positively, and those with negative feelings evaluated negatively. These results were discussed by using the concept of mood congruent effect.

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The anagram task is widely used in psychological research to manipulate independent factors such as successes/failures and cognitive load, and to measure dependent variables such as cognitive processing ability and task effort. The purposes of the present study were to clarify what factors determine the difficulty of an anagram and to develop a database of anagrams for psychological experiment. Nineteen university students worked on 147 five-letter hiragana anagrams. We measured the time required to solve each anagram and subjective difficulty as indexes of task difficulty, and familiarity, imageability, and valence as word characteristics. We found significant correlations between the task difficulty indexes and word characteristics, such that the higher the word characteristic ratings, the easier the anagram. This suggests that anagram task difficulty can be manipulated by considering word characteristics.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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In English, lexical decision times are longer to homophones than they are to nonhomophones (homophone effects) when they have more frequent mates. However, the findings for Japanese homophones with multiple mates have been inconsistent. It is possible that the variance in phonological familiarity of Japanese homophones with many mates is large, which may then influence their lexical decision times. An experiment was conducted to measure lexical decision times to Japanese homophones with multiple mates, with high and low phonological familiarity conditions as well as nonhomophones for comparison. The results showed that the mean lexical decision time to homophones in the low-familiarity condition was longer than it was to nonhomophones, and that in the high-familiarity condition did not differ as compared to nonhomophones. These findings indicate that multiple mates of Japanese homophones substantially increase the variance of their phonological familiarities, which in turn influences their lexical decision times.

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When the value of alternatives was even, which is easy for us to select the best one or the worst one? In order to explore the effect of the instruction for decision-making, we performed experimental study using a selection paradigm. The experiment was made up of two steps. In the first step, the subjects were asked to choose best three items from ten alternatives. In the second step, the subjects were asked to choose or discard the items from the three alternatives in four conditions: “choose one item”, “choose two items”, “discard one item” and “discard two items”. The results indicated that subjects took longer time in “discard two” condition than “choose two” condition. In addition, participants answered that ”two throw away” was more difficult than the other instructions in introspection. These results imply that discarding behaviour take much psychological load rather than choosing behaviour.

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Previous studies have shown that confirmatory questions enhance the understandability of an explanation. Examples include asking a degree of understanding of the listener and current state of the description target in verbal explanation. In the current study, we examined the effect of two types of confirmatory question by the speaker on the degree of understanding of the listener. We manipulated the types of explanation: (a) the speaker asks a degree of understanding of the listener, (b) the speaker asks a current state of the description target, and (c) the speaker simply repeats the explanation. The highest understandability score was attained when the explanation was repeated. Accuracy scores of the drawing were high in all three situations; we therefore conclude that confirmatory questions are not effective in every situation of verbal explanation. Repetition of the explanation is sufficient to increase the listener’s understanding if the content of the description is simple. 

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[in Japanese]

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Currently, industrial firms are producing variety of products with many employees divided to functionally different groups in collaborations. Although it is broadly known that communication between those groups are so important for successful productions, it is often said that those communications are difficult, to which Tanikawa et al. (2015) hypothesized that differences of regulatory focus of each group are affecting, based on the regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 1997). In this study, we conducted a group problem solving experiment with a desert survival task, operationally setting up two different goals (promotion focus goal, P, and prevention focus goal, D).  Participants were randomly assigned to an experimental couple with the same goal (PP / DD) or the different goals (PD). Results showed differences of answers to the problems and utterance contents between couple-conditions, even though no differences in the total number of utterances. Relation between Communication and motivation will be discussed.

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People often mishear spoken utterances. Semantic context, background noise, and pronunciation clarity (how clearly words are pronounced) are potential causes of such misperceptions. The present study investigated the influence of these three factors on spoken word recognition. We took recordings of a female speaker and manipulated pronunciation clarity using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2015) by gradually changing the target word from 3 moras to 2 moras in 5 steps. Additionally, we made three semantic contexts by adding phrases that were meaningful for the 2 moras word, 3 moras word, or both. Finally, we presented the stimuli with cafeteria noise ratio( at three signal-to-noise ratios: ±0dB, -5dB, none). The results indicated that the effect of semantic context differs in degree depending on the speech clarity and signal-to-noise ratio.

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 The paradoxical thought rebound effect following attempted thought suppression has been well documented. The present study examined the after-effects of attempted thought suppression and expression of two distinct facets of pride ("authentic" and "hubristic"). One hundred and eighty-four college students completed the Twenty Statements Test (TST; respond to the question “Who am I ?”) under following five conditions; (1) suppressing authentic pride (AP), (2) actively expressing AP, (3) suppressing hubristic pride (HP), (4) actively expressing HP, or (5) without any restrictions. Then, all participants completed the TST without any restrictions. The results showed that suppressing any kinds of pride itself was difficult, and that expressing hubristic pride in the first TST caused a decrease in negative self-descriptions in the second TST.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Previous studies have shown that rumination has aspects of causal analytical, understanding, and uncontrollable, rumination occurs because of them. In the resent studies, uncontrollable negatively correlated with decentering, while self-regulation effects on decentering. The aim of this study was to explore the relationships between uncontrollable, self-regulation and decentering. To evaluate validate those relationships, under graduate students (N = 291) completed the japanese version of Leuven Adaptation of the Rumination on Sadness Scale(LARSS), The Experiences Questionnaire (EQ), Ruminative Responses Scale(RRS), and effortful control scale. The results illustrated that there are positively relationships between self-regulation and decentering, and uncontrollable. Path analysis revealed that self-regulation played  a mediating role on the relation between decentering and uncontrollable. These findings implicate that self-regulation  associated with decentering, improving selfregulation leads to prevent maladaptive rumination.

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