The issue of forgiveness in mother-child relations has seldom been studied empirically, although Heisaku Kosawa has deepened our knowledge of this subject through psychoanalytic methods based on Ajase complex theory. The aim of this study is to clarify possible processes whereby mothers forgive their children, and their children are forgiven by their mothers. Specifically, 10 mothers were interviewed about what process they followed when they actually forgave their children, and their 12 adolescent children were asked about their processes of being forgiven. The data were analyzed using the Modified Grounded Theory Approach (M-GTA). The results showed that forgiving and being forgiven each has a four-level process model. The results assert that a mother tries to maintain her function as a parent even after some hurtful and/or puzzling experiences, and that her attitude consequently leads the child to realize that he/she is actually forgiven. In addition, we considered some possible recognition gaps between the forgiving mother and the forgiven child, and the clinical problems associated with these gaps.

One reason why praise of others is not always effective is a gap between the intentions of the giver of praise and the perceptions of the recipient of praise. In this research, the factor which caused such a gap was defined as “attitudes towards praise,” and this factor was analyzed in terms of developmental changes in attitudes. A sample of 1,058 individuals that included middle school students, high school students, college students and adults completed a questionnaire on attitudes towards praise and their experiences as providers and recipients of praise. The results showed that as individuals became older, “approval” and “instrumental” attitudes grew stronger while “standardization” and “hesitation” attitudes grew weaker. While experiences of being praised strongly affected the formation of attitudes towards praise, it was evident that people were influenced more strongly by how they were praised than how often they were praised. It was also shown that how often one praised others influenced the praisers' attitudes, as mediated by their experience with successful communication of praise.

This research examined the effects of written descriptions of people with developmental disabilities on the reluctance of abled readers to interact with disabled people. Participants without disabilities were asked to read one of 4 types of stimuli (between-subject factors) that were manipulated as two factors: concreteness (high/low) and description of interactions between a person with developmental disabilities and other persons without disabilities (included/not included). They were next asked to imagine a peer with some of the characteristics from the written stimuli and complete the friendship and self-assertiveness subscales of a questionnaire. The results indicated that participants who read a highly concrete document were significantly less reluctant to interact, compared to those who read a less concrete document. The participants who read a document describing interactions were not more significantly reluctant to interact than those who read a document that did not describe an interaction. The discussion focused on use of knowledge from social psychology and suggested guidelines for documentation of developmental disabilities.

Recent research has focused on a kind of empathetic response called an “attuned response,” as exhibited by mothers of young children with secure attachment styles. Kabaya (2013) found that these mothers responded to their pre-linguistic infants' negative emotions by making “mind-related comments with a smile.” The present longitudinal study examined another sample of infant-mother pairs (N＝40) to investigate whether mothers with secure attachment styles continue to exhibit such attuned responses to their toddlers' negativism, which is accompanied by mother-toddler conflict. Mothers' facial and verbal responses to their children's emotional expressions were observed when their children were 8- and 14-months old. Regression analyses showed that mothers with secure attachment styles responded to their 14-month-old toddlers' emotions of anger or negativism with “mind-related comments with a neutral face.” These mothers also responded to their 8-month-old infants' negative emotions in the same way. This consistency suggests that mothers with secure attachment styles empathetically verbalize their pre-toddlers' and toddlers' negative emotions.