The act of bowing is common in Japan and is generally believed to contribute substantially to establishing positive first impressions. Recently, Osugi & Kawahara (2015) empirically investigated the influences of bowing on perceptions of attractiveness & reported that mildly tilting motions of a portrait image, which mimicked bowing, enhanced perceptions of attractiveness. The present series of studies further examines the modulation of bowing effects. The results of Study 1 indicate that bowing effects are independent of the physical attractiveness of faces (Experiments 1 and 2), gender contrasts (Experiment 3), and contrasts between human and non-human objects (Experiment 4). These results suggest that the visual system combines bowing effects and physical characteristics independently and additively in evaluating the subjective attractiveness of faces. Moreover, the results of Study 2, which investigates whether such tendencies are consistent with metacognitions about bowing effects, indicate a discrepancy between the experimental results and metacognition towards bowing effects, such that people estimate smaller effects of bowing non-human agents and less attractive humans.

This study examines the effects of intention to memorize list items on false memory when lists are repeatedly presented in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Participants were presented with item pairs, extracted from two different lists, of which they were asked to memorize one item (intentional learning condition) while ignoring the other item (incidental learning condition). The item pairs were presented either once, five times, or ten times. The results for the intentional learning condition showed that the rates for correct recognitions increased and the rates for false recognitions decreased as a function of presentation repetitions. In contrast, in the incidental learning condition, the rates of false recognitions did not change as presentation repetitions increased, although the rate for correct recognitions increased monotonically. These findings suggest that intention to memorize moderates the relationship between list repetitions and false recognitions and that the pattern of false recognitions may vary according to whether the participants are aware of the critical lure items.

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) refer to memories of personal experiences that spontaneously come to mind. This paper examines the relationship between the fluency of associations in a word association task and the frequencies of IAMs. In Study 1, 197 undergraduate participants reported on IAMs elicited during a word association task and rated the associated words according to their retrieval spontaneity. Participants reported more IAMs when the associated word came to mind spontaneously. In Study 2, 26 undergraduate participants reported on IAMs elicited during controlled field interviews conducted while walking across campus with the experimenter. The Study 2 participants also took part in the word association task in the laboratory. The frequencies of IAMs elicited during the field interviews were significantly correlated with the numbers of associated words in the laboratory-based task (r=.53). These results indicate that IAMs are based on associations within the memory network and share underlying mechanisms with word associations.