Most contemporary adolescents discuss relationships with their friends by using kyara, a shortened form of the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “character.” This study examined the relationship between friendship with kyara and approval motivation or fear of being negatively evaluated in a comparison of junior high school and university students. In all, 434 junior high school students and 219 university students participated in the study and completed a questionnaire. The results suggested that the university students use kyara at higher rate in their friendship than junior high school students did, and those who incorporated kyara scored higher on praise seeking than those who did not. Factor analysis identified three factors that are part of the acceptance of kyara: active acceptance, rejection, and indifference. An analysis indicated that praise seekers exhibited kyara, and praise seeking was related to the active acceptance of kyara. On the contrary, those with a sense of fear of negative evaluations tended to reject kyara. These results were found regardless of the students' educational level.

This study explores the self-esteem of junior high school students as a product of the sense of authenticity and contingent self-esteem to determine how this product affects school adjustment. Self-esteem was classified into four types, based on combinations of students' sense of authenticity and superiority. We examined 676 students in the first to third years of junior high school. Our hypothesis was partially supported: no difference in the ratio of appearance of these two factors according to academic year was observed in the four types of combination of the senses of authenticity and superiority. Further, the sense of authenticity affected school adjustment more significantly than the sense of superiority did. Additionally, students with both a high sense of authenticity and a high sense of superiority had good social skills and exhibited the highest level of school adjustment, indicating the importance of a balance between these senses of self-esteem for junior high school students.

The Rock-Paper-Scissors game is used as a way of making specific decisions based on incidental outcomes. The present study aimed to investigate how children acquire the underlying cognitive functions to play the game relating to understanding of “three-way deadlock structure” through developmental processes. There were 569 children (age range＝12–83 months) who were evaluated. In this study, the task consisted of three subtasks: (1) “understanding rock-paper-scissors symbols”; (2) “judgment of winning”; and (3) “judgment of losing”. We evaluated the children's developmental levels using the Kyoto Scale of Psychological Development-2001(KSPD2001). Children aged 2.6 years had a 50% success rate in passing the first task, for the second task the age at which the 50% success rate was achieved was 4.8 years, and for the third task it was 5.4 years. Significant correlations were confirmed between the developmental age assessed in the KSPD2001 and the five stages of understanding the game. The results suggest that this task is useful to evaluate specific children's stages in understanding the game, and to assess developmental levels of young children.

This study revealed features in the lexical aspect of infant-directed speech (IDS) by analyzing five minute speech samples of 158 mothers of children aged 9, 12, 14, 18, 21, and 24 months. IDS was divided into four baby talk types; onomatopoeia, baby-form words (further divided into nouns, verbal nouns, adjectives, and communicators), addition of a suffix, and phoneme conversion. The frequency of types and tokens per utterance unit was calculated. Only onomatopoeia showed a significant difference among the age groups. High frequency of onomatopoeia repetition and onomatopoeia markers with special morae were observed. Verbal nouns were significantly more frequent in baby-form words, and phoneme conversion (e.g.: doozo → doojo) occurred as well. The follow-up survey with 127 children from the original group at 33 months revealed the effect of IDS on children's linguistic development. The frequency of baby-form words aged 14 months predicted productive conventional-form words at 33 months. According to its iconicity, baby-form words may have a role in providing a foundation for children to learn rules of arbitrary connections between words and objects.