The present study mainly aimed to examine differences in international students ’mental health according to nationality and Japanese language skills in order to provide suggestions for improving student support systems in Japanese higher education. A total of 76 international students and 6 Japanese students (mean age = 25.4, women = 34.2%) from a Japanese university completed the Kessler 6 (K6) as a part of their regular health assessments and agreed to the use of their data for research purposes. According to the results of ANCOVA controlling for sex, age, and financial condition and subsequent analyses, K6 scores of international students from Southeast Asia and South Asia were higher than those observed in interna- tional students from East Asia. Moreover, ANCOVA results for international students only controlling for sex, age, financial condition, length of stay in Japan, and Japanese language skills showed that K6 scores were higher in students from South Asia than in those from East Asia. University staff should take these differences into consideration to improve student support.

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We conducted four experiments to examine the effect of talker facial orientation on the perception of speech syllables. Similar to the syllables typically used in McGurk effect experiments, the audiovisual stimuli we used in these experiments were the syllables /ba/, /da/, and /ga/, spoken by Japanese talkers. The visual stimuli consisted of a left and right profile view of the talkers, and mirror images of these views. The syllable sound that was uttered was congruently or incongruently combined with the visual stimuli. In Experiment 1, speech misperception of voice significantly increased when the talker ’s face was oriented to the left, indicating that perception occurred asymmetrically, depending on facial orientation. In Experiment 2, we recorded videos of the left and right profiles of the talkers, as well as from the front and three-quarters to the left and right of the talkers. Perceptual error increased again when the talker ’ s face was oriented to the left. Experiment 3 showed that the misperception decreased when only voice stimuli were presented and that the pattern of voice misperception was different from that in Experiment 2. Experiment 4 confirmed that when a face was presented in the absence of voices, and the pattern of speech misperception was also different from that in Experiment 2. These results suggest that speech misperception due to facial orientation asymmetricity occurred not at the level of unimodal, auditory, or visual perceptual processing but at the level of processing involving the integration of audio and visual information.

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The present study examined directed forgetting in rats using the eight-arm radial maze with food cups in the middle and at the end of each arm, respectively. A trial consisted of learning phase, retention phase, and test phase. In the learning phase, win or lose of a food pellet in the middle cups was signaled whether a large reward would be set in the test phase. Chocolate chips or rice pops set in the end cups served as remember-cue (R-cue) or forget-cue (F-cue) that signaled whether those arms would be used or not in the test phase. One Lose-R arm, two Lose-F arms, and five Win-R arms were presented in the learning phase. In the test phase, the two F arms were excluded from testing by closing doors. 10 pellets were set in the Lose-R arm. In the probe test after acquisition, one of Lose-F arms was presented instead of a Lose-R arm in the test phase. Rats showed poorer performance in the probe test than in the normal test, although difference between these conditions fell slightly short of significance (p = .059). The results suggest that the directed forgetting paradigm in the present study might be effective in promoting memory resource reallocation in a working memory process and in examining directed forgetting in rats.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the validity of the classification of the positive emo- tion words on the pleasure and arousal dimensions. A total of 151 graduate and undergraduate students participated in the investigation. They located the areas of pleasure and arousal dimensions for about 11 positive emotion words using the Affect Grid. In addition, they classified the positive emotion words into two dimensions. As a result, it was revealed that the positive emotion words were distinguished more by the arousal dimension than the pleasure dimension. In addition, it was shown that women recognized feelings more strongly than men. In addition to the pleasure and arousal dimension, it will be necessary to examine the other dimensions in the future.

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This study explores how career consciousness relates to friendship, communication skills, career formation skills, self-esteem, and active involvement with others in adolescents. Surveys were ad- ministered to 403 college students (152 males, 249 females, 2 unknown). A structural equation modeling analysis revealed that adolescents who tried to achieve harmony in their friendships or tried not to avoid an close friendship, had better communication ,high self-esteem and better career formation skills ,and ultimately aimed for regular employment. In particular, the adolescents who tended to relate well to the person outside the university or to try their hand at new things had found to have high communication and career formation skills, and to aim for regular employment. This suggests that the ability to relate to unfamiliar people has a positive effect on the formation of career consciousness.

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