Graph theoretical analysis has recently been used to study brain function. This study aims to compare the functional brain networks derived from electroencephalography (EEG) of 10 patients suffering from epilepsy with 10 healthy subjects based on graph theory. Five epochs per healthy subject, and ten epochs (during epileptiform discharge and non-discharge) per patient were selected and analyzed using wavelet-crosscorrelation analysis. The clustering coefficient, characteristic path length, small-worldness, and nodal betweenness centrality were calculated using graph analysis. The results showed that in the patients, Wavelet-crosscorrelation Coefficients (WCC) were significantly higher, and clustering and path length were significantly lower during discharge compared with the healthy subjects, along with alterations in the hub regions. These results suggest a loss of small-world topology in the functional brain network of epilepsy patients. A loss of small-world topology was found even during non-discharge, therefore network indices might aid to distinguish epilepsy patients from healthy individuals.

For patients who have suffered a stroke and are undergoing rehabilitation, the motivation for recovery and achievement of independence is a major factor that must be considered for effective treatment. A patient’s sense of agency affects their motivation for activities, such as rehabilitation. This study was conducted to investigate the motivation and sense of agency of patients with cerebrovascular disease who were undergoing rehabilitation and to examine the influence of nursing involvement on improving patient independence. This study of inpatients in a rehabilitation hospital ward was conducted using questionnaires. Our results suggest that sense of agency may affect patient motivation during hospitalization and was influenced by nursing support for independence. Interventions targeted to improve the patient’s sense of agency were shown to be a potentially effective method for improving the patient’s rehabilitative motivation. Nursing support for independence provides a promising effective strategy for improving the patient’s sense of agency.

Anti-drug education is one of the important and necessary educational activities for young people. In this paper, a virtual reality based (VR-based) material for learning anti-drug skills is proposed. By using the learning material, learners are exposed in a virtual unsafe drug situation, and can feel the dangerousness seriously to learn the harms and risks of drug abuse while improving their abilities to refuse drugs. In order to evaluate the proposed material, it was compared with a video-based learning material which has the same contents with the VR-based learning material. Experiments were conducted and the results were analyzed from the aspects of effect on the users’ attitudes, users’ satisfaction, and anti-drug self-efficacy. As the result, it became clear that learners can learn effectively with the VR-based learning material more than with the video-based learning material.

Motorcycle riders’ fatality is four times that of four-wheeled vehicle drivers. Previous studies have shown the effect of the Advanced Rider Assistance System (ARAS) is different depending on the user’s driving style. To realize personally optimized ARAS, it needs to keep track of riding performance and emotional state. Most studies define one index as driving performance to control the onset timing of ARAS. In this study, we designed a structural equation model to identify the driving behavior indexes that are directly related to the risk of traffic accidents from the emotional state and driving behavior. We investigated the driving behaviors of 23 test subjects using a riding simulator by inducing various emotional states in different conditions of driving scenery, traffic volume, and music. As a result, this model suggests that arousal level, valence level, carelessness, lateral instability, steering instability, and driving style are related to riding performance.

This study employed the peak-end rule and the Kano model in the assessment of user satisfaction during the product-use experience. Because they reflect different aspects of user satisfaction, we investigated the similarities and differences between the two approaches and integrated them in the analysis of the product-use process. We find that the emotional component of the peak-end rule, which directly indicates the important emotions of the users, and the usability component of the Kano model, which provides useful information on product qualities, are particularly useful in assessing the product-use process. We believe that integrating these two methods generates abundant, specific, and useful knowledge that designers can use to more fully understand the user experience.

How complex should the food photographs of a restaurant menu be? Studies on image complexity have been conducted using objective and subjective approaches. Nevertheless, neither approach considers the factors that photographers commonly manipulate during image creation. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the impression of complexity considering these factors. Through interviews, factors like the Camera Angle, Background, Lighting, Light Color, and the Number of Decorative Elements were identified and defined. Based on these definitions, food images were analyzed and tested by participants who assessed their impression of complexity. The results suggested that the amount of decorative element is a factor with a significant effect on the impression of complexity. Furthermore, the correlation between the number of decorative elements and the evaluations suggested that measuring food image complexity according to the decoration in the image is a closer representation of the impression of complexity judged by human subjects.

This study investigated the role of secondhand information for impression formation in spoken communication, using a voice transfer system. In Experiment 1, listeners were presented with spoken sentences that represented someone’s behavior in either a positive or negative prosody, which is a clue for forming impressions. Listeners rated each social impression of a person who took on a specific behavior. The results showed that the formed impressions were weaker when the affective characteristics of voices were inconsistent with those of behavioral descriptions. Experiment 2 tested the effects of sentence meanings on forming impressions of speakers’ voices using the same sound files. Results revealed that social impressions of speakers’ voices were also modulated by sentence meaning, even though the sentence was not related to the speaker. This study underscores the role of secondhand information in social impression and advances the understanding of the interaction between prosody and meanings in spoken communication.

The establishment of methods for recording and analyzing the dynamic changes in the human affective responses is important for understanding and utilizing affective dynamics. This study analyzes the structure of sensory and affective responses recorded through the temporal dominance (TD) method, which is an effective dynamic sensory appraisal approach. Temporal evolution is modeled by state-space local-level equations, and the structure of the responses is estimated based on the covariance matrix of the disturbances of the state variables. This approach is applied to the TD responses for strawberries recorded in a previous study, and its validity is examined.