With Navon stimuli that differ in visual angle, we examine the hypothesis that a negative mood focuses the observer's attention on small and local features of these stimuli and a positive mood focuses attention on large and global features. Before and after manipulating mood by either listening to music or looking at a picture book, each of the 72 participants was asked about which local or global feature of each stimulus they perceived more clearly and gave the strongest impression. We found that the larger the size of the stimulus, the more participants tended to response to a local feature. From the numbers of local responses, we determined a threshold size at which responses to global features exceeded the number of responses to local features. The results indicate that the mean threshold was lower under the negative mood condition, but unchanged in the positive mood condition. On the basis of these findings, we argue that that the effect of positive mood is not stable, but rather emerges when the global features are related to the positive affective value or are higher accessible, whereas the effect of the negative mood does not depend on such relations.

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This study examines the relationships between personality, level of knowledge, cognitive factors, emotions, and behaviors (i.e., intentions and requests to act as a saiban-in ‘lay judge’) within two groups; one consisting of individuals with steady jobs and one of individuals without steady jobs. We surveyed 321 individuals aged between 20 and 70 years. The results reveal that the group without steady jobs tended to be more insecure and stressed and to make stronger requests about the lay judge system. In addition, while the group with steady jobs possessed considerable knowledge about this system, they tended to believe that it would bother their colleagues if they were to do jury service. In terms of the relationships between these factors, two processes were common for both groups; namely, emotional and cognitive decision-making. Further, the level of knowledge in the two groups was found to influence both these processes. This finding suggests that level of knowledge is one of the most important factors to increase individuals' awareness about participation and requests to participate as a lay judge.

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Recent studies have shown that facial expression influences judgments of facial impression. Much of the evidence indicates that women are better in identifying various displays of facial affect. It is expected that this gender difference in the recognition of facial expressions will affect the processing of facial impression judgments. Here we compare judged impressions and emotion intensities of faces when displaying a positive (smile), neutral, or negative (sad) expression. It has been found that cosmetics influence facial impression. In the facial impression condition, participants were asked to rate their impressions of cosmetics. In the facial expression condition, participants were asked to rate the intensity of the expression. The results suggest that there was no gender difference in the ability to rate the emotional cues in the faces. For the females, however, the influence of emotional expressions on facial impression judgments was greater than for males.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relative detectability of endpoints and closures in a given random figure. A new detection task is introduced in which participants were requested to judge the state (i.e., presence or absence) of a pre-designated endpoint or a closure in a singly presented random figure. Rigorous control was exerted over the selection of stimulus figures possessing these features. The results seem somewhat confusing: the presence of closures and the absence of endpoints were identical in terms of stimulus states but elicited different levels of detectability depending upon the designated target feature (i.e., an asymmetry in detectability), the mental set for closure detection seemed to be more efficient than the mental set for endpoint detection, and the assumption of feature detection via feature search did not appear viable. To comprehensively account for these results, this paper proposes an explanation that assumes a default decision state (i.e., the presence of closures when the target feature is closures, and the absence of an endpoint when the target feature is an endpoint) and quick responses for situations that deviate from the default state.

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A number of studies have demonstrated the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE), where execution of a motor response is facilitated by reading sentences that describe actions that involve the same direction. It has also been demonstrated that the representations for subsequent words are activated during reading. However, our previous study failed to observe the ACE between subsequent verbs and the required responses immediately after the object in subject-object-verb (S-O-V) sentences. The present study manipulates the stimulus onset asynchronicity (SOA) between the sentence object and the go-signal for responses to investigate whether the ACE could be observed when participants execute their responses after anticipating the subsequent sentence verb. While the ACE was observed in a long SOA condition, it was not found in a short SOA condition. Moreover, participants with medium language processing speeds tended to exhibit large ACEs in the long SOA condition.

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The present study examines how naming, affective arousal, and affective valence of odor cues affect autobiographical remembering. In the experiment, 118 participants rated the familiarity, affective arousal, and affective valence of 30 odor stimuli, attempted to name each odor, and then indicated whether the odor cued an autobiographical memory. If a memory was retrieved, the participant rated the memory in terms of vividness, affective arousal, and affective valence. The results indicate that odors which could be correctly named are more familiar and emotionally affective than ones that could not be correctly named. In addition, mood-congruent recall was observed. Memories cued by correctly-named odors were rated as being more vivid and emotional than memories elicited by unnamed odors. These findings suggest that naming and emotion play a significant role in odor-cued autobiographical remembering.

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The “problem of three prisoners”is a vigorous example of counter-intuitive problems to estimate posterior probability. It is so counter-intuitive that a lot of people have a difficulty in accepting the normative estimate based on Bayes’theorem. We proposed a modified version of the original problem by changing prior probabilities given in the problem text. It would lead to different estimates depending on the cognitive strategy taken, and the Bayesian estimate is even more counter-intuitive than that of original version. Factors that contribute to its difficulty were examined through mathematical analyses and psychological experiments. Multiple factors are identified, among which an intermediate-level representation of the problem structure was emphasized. We also proposed a “roulette representation” which is a mathematically isomorphic, visual model to facilitate more intuitive understanding of the Bayesian solution. The naïve schemas and heuristics underlying subjective estimation of posterior probability are discussed. Significance and implications of our studies are further discussed in the context of recent related studies.

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