This paper focuses on issues concerning the social cognition and communication of researchers. The stereotypes held by social cognition researchers regarding human beings and regarding their research participants have changed over the past fifty years. They are, however, alike in their use of metaphors such as "isolated, faulty computers" and "animals that respond to researchers" in common. These stereotypes, have raised several methodological problems in research settings. We suggest the directions toward which these stereotypes could be changed and research methodologies be elaborated if social cognition researchers take into account the communication that takes place between researchers and their participants in research settings.

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In writing the word hinoki 'cypress' in kanji, there are two commonly-used alternative forms, 檜 (the so-called "traditional" form) and 桧 (a "simplified" form), both of which have the same meaning and pronunciation. Such alternative forms are called kanji variants. In this study we presented 72 informants with 263 pairs of traditional and simplified forms, with instructions to choose the ones they would prefer to use when writing with a word processor. Six months later, the same informants repeated the same task. The degree of preference was calculated for the traditional forms of the 263 pairs, and showed an extremely high correlation (r=0.96) between the two tasks. This result proved that the kanji variant preference task was very reliable. Further, we had a different group of 65 informants perform a forced-choice task between two-alternatives involving 263 pairs of traditional and simplified forms, with instructions to choose the forms that they feel more familiar with. This data was analyzed in correlation with the kanji variant preference task.

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This study examined the influence of differences in cue information on impression formation of dyadic conversations. Participants were exposed to four natural conversation conditions: text condition, text + response latency condition, sound condition, and video condition, and were asked to rate the speaker and the conversation according to affability and social desirability, etc. Based on the Social Presence Theory (Short et al., 1976), it was hypothesized that the affability and attractiveness of the speaker would be evaluated in decreasing order from video condition, sound condition, text + response latency condition and text condition. The results indicated that affability in the video condition was evaluated higher than in the text or the text + response latency conditions, which partially supported the experimental hypothesis. Moreover, social desirability was evaluated higher in the sound and video conditions in comparison to the text or text + response latency conditions. The results also suggested that sound information was an additional cue that influenced impressions regarding the speed of conversation and response.

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This paper examines the relative impact of verbal-nonverbal inconsistency and the affective responses and actions of the receiver on the attribution of sender intentions in conversation. Under the experiment, 26 males and 13 females, aged between 18 to 24 years, interacted with a confederate using audio intercom. Participants rated their feelings and made inferences about the intentions of the confederate. The participants' behavior was rated separately by two trained observers. Analyses of the results revealed that verbal cues had a significant effect on the attribution of intentions, affective responses and behavior when participants received inconsistent communication, but both verbal and nonverbal cues had a similar effect on attributions concerning intentions and affective responses when participants received consistent communication. Further investigation of inconsistent communication in a variety of actual social situations is necessary in order to generalize about the use of verbal cues dominating the nonverbal that was used in this experimental condition.

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Researches conducted by Fujimoto et al. have introduced a new concept about the speaker role; namely, a speaker speaks according to a distinct role acquired in response to his/her individual characteristic and situation. This paper looks at an attempt to specify a speaker role inductively from his/her predication pattern and conversation development pattern in a conversation. Firstly, five conversation development patterns were extracted from data of small-group discussions. Secondly, a canonical correlation analysis was conducted to show the relationship between conversation development patterns and the predication patterns that had been extracted in Fujimoto and Daibo (2005, in press). As a result, three speaker roles (the chairperson, listener, and speaker) were specified.

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The objective of this study was to determine the influence of intensifiers and suspicion on the perceived deceptiveness of verbal messages by means of a questionnaire. Two types of messages (with and without intensifiers), and two situations (with and without suspicion) were constructed. The participants (157 university students), were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: (1) intensifiers and suspicion, (2) no-intensifiers and suspicion, (3) intensifiers and no-suspicion, and (4) no-intensifiers and no-suspicion, and were then asked to rate perceived deceptiveness according to a seven-point rating scale. A 2×2 ANOVA using perceived deceptiveness as the dependent variable and message type and situation type as the independent variables revealed that only the situation type had a significant effect. In addition, no significant correlations were found between perceived deceptiveness and the Trust Scale. Finally, the implications of these findings are discussed.

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