The purpose of this study was to clarify the psychological traits of juvenile delinquents, from the relationship between two ideal images (social ideal and personal ideal) and two self images (possible and real). In this study, developmental viewpoint and the relationships among four images were given special importance. 113 juvenile delinquents and 438 high shcool and college students (from 16 to 19 years, meles only) responded to a SD scale containing 17 items of four concepts respectively, and a self-esteem scale containing 10 items. The result showed that the delinquents marked low score in (strength and seriousness) factors of social ideal image, and high scores in (strength, tenderness and extroversion) factors of real-self image. This result suggested juvenile delinquents had a self-megalomanic tendency and a weak normative sense. From the profiles of ideal images and the low correlation between the ideal-real self discrepancy and the self-esteem score, it was clarified that young juvenile delinquents had undifferentiated ideal images and their internalization of social and personal ideal was weak, compared with a control group.

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The relationship between the emergence of language (word production, word comprehension) and the occurrence of symbolic behavior was longitudinally examined in 15 mentally retarded children who were nonverbal at the beginning of this study. Play behavior and word production were observed and word comprehension was assessed in task situation. Children who comprehended and produced object words increased the ratio of symbolic behaviors with progressing of the experimental sessions. In contrast, children who produced no object words did not show such behaviors so frequently. In the former case, the ratio of symbolic behavior at word production was higher than that at word comprehension. Three children who comprehended and produced at different experimental sessions, increasingly showed higher dimension of symbolic behavior (SYM2) rather than in the lower (SYM1). There were two associations regarding the occurrence of symbolic behavior at each language emergence: comprehension and production. Relations were also found between word production and SYM1, and between word production and SYM2.

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The present study was designed to investigate transfer effects of rule learnings in kindergarten children. In Experiment 1, children were run a same/different (non-recurred task) with trial-unique stimuli and run shift learning. They acquired relational rules based upon the sameness or differentness of stimuli paris, and transferred them to novel stimuli. In Experiment 2, matching and non-matching groups trained on a recency-memory task (recurred task) learned a subsequent same/different task more rapidly than both habituation and simultaneous discrimination groups. In Experiment 3, children trained on the same/different task learned both a subsequent matching and non-matching problem in a recency-memory task more rapidly than habituation group. These findings indicated that a sameness or differentness concept learing were acquired in a recurred task transfers to a sameness or differentness concept learning in a non-recurred task, and vice versa. These findings were discussed with configuration of stimuli pairs hypothesis advocated by Nakagawa (1993b).

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Two experiments investigated the role of world knowledge, namely scripts, during text comprehension. Subjects, undergraduate students, read the texts in which the sequences of script actions were involved and they took the sentence recognition tests immediately after reading each text. In Experiment I, each text contained three scripts. At the last block of the same script, the sentences were read more quickly than the first and the middle blocks. When important actions were deleted, increase in reading time of the sentence describing the next action was found but not when unimportant actions were deleted. These results showed the guiding effects of scripts, and the inferences of important actions were likely to be made during reading. In Experiment II, a sequence of script actions was interrupted by the other script actions or by irrelevant sentences. When the original script actions were read after the interruption, increase in reading time was not found. The results indicated that the activation of the original script was maintained at the end of the text.

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In a first study, teachers were asked to nominate the students who had either egoistic or altruistic charachteristics in their thinking and behavior in their everyday lives. The students chosen by the teachers completed the questionnaires concerning egoistic or altruistic thinking and behavior. The major findings were as follows; 1. Considerable discrepancies were found among the chosen students. 2. As for self-evaluation, the “egoistic students” considered themselves to be less egoistic than did the “altruistic” and “other students”. These results could be seen as reflecting the immaturity of the psycho-social skills of the egoistic students as compared to the altruistic students. The second study was carried out to prove the above assumption. Questionnaires about the social and psychological skill of the students were distributed to the teachers. After analysing the results, the assumption proved to he accurate. The results also indicated that it was more difficult for the teachers to discover the underlying causes behind the behaviors of “egoistic” students than those behind the “altruistic” students.

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The purpose of the present study was to clarify the relationship between the time perspective and the general perceived control. A questionnaire of the time perspective and a scale of the general perceived control were administered to 284 junior high school students (140 males and 144 females). By factor analysis, the time perspective questionnaire was divided into three factors, named as follows: “unsatisfaction for past, present and future”,“future-orientation” and “past-orientation”. The main results were summarized as follows: (1) The low group of the general perceived control showed higher degree of unsatisfaction for past, present, and future than the high group.(2) In the high group of the general perceived control, the relationship between the unsatisfaction for past, present and future, and the future-orientation showed positive.

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The present study was to investigate the knowledge of problem structure acquired by solving a problem. Materials were the modified Duncker's radiation problems. Subjects solved the basic problem first and then solved the target problem. Whether or not the structural features of the problem were the same between base and target problem was manipulated as the experimental factors. The manipulated experimental factors were as follows; (1) goal-causality: the reason why goal state must be realized; (2) constraint-causality: the reason why the constraint occurs in the problem state; (3) object relation in the problem. The following results were obtained; the sameness of the constraint-causality between two problems had an effect on target problem solving only when either the goal-causality or the object relation was the same between base and target problem. These results suggested that the knowledge of problem structure involved the goal-causality and the object relation as well as the constraint-causality and solution plan.

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Two studies were conducted to examine the characteristics and structure of 12 achievement-related affects. In Study I, 224 undergraduates rated the 24 concepts (12 affects×2 items) on the three scales (with six 7-point semantic differential-type items per scale) of pleasure-displeasure, arousal-nonarousal and dominance-submis-siveness. The results showed that these three dimensions were also valid to define the structure of achievement-related affects, and dominance-submissiveness dimension had the most important roles on the descriptions of the characteristics of affects. In Study II, the ratings concerning the list of affective words obtained in Nasu and Horino (1991) were cluster analyzed. In analysis, two large clusters were revealed. The affects included in the first cluster were “mastery oriented” affects. On the other hand, the second cluster represented “helpless oriented” affects (Dweck, 1975), or affects related to “ego-involved” tendencies (Nicholls, 1984).

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The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between friendly images that Asian students have of Japan and the factors affecting them. The constructs studied were as follows: friendly images of the Japanese, friendly images of the Japanese Government, length of stay, Japanese language ability, feeling of discrimination, friendship with Japanese people and cognition of Japan's responsibility in World War II. One hundred and thirty-four (134) Asian students living in this country answered the questionnaire. The data obtained were analyzed using covariance structure analysis. The results showed that: (a) when a direct path of length of stay on experience of discrimination was added to the assumed model, the appropriateness of the FIT Index was high, and (b) Asian students' images of Japan and its people did not differ significantly in terms of length of stay, native country and sex.

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According to Dreger and Aiken (1957), mathematics anxiety is defined as a “syndrome of emotional reaction to arithmatics and mathematics”. In this study, a primary objective was to develop a scale to measure mathematics anxiety and a secondary objective was to examine factors related to mathematics anxiety. In survey 1, Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale (made of 34 items) was drawn up, and its reliability and validity were studied using 300 university students. In survey 2, the importance of early mathematics education for the development of mathematics anxiety was supported by 146 university students.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects that test directions of multiple choice tests produce on examinees' test-taking behaviors and performance. The data for this research were obtained by having students respond to 57 items of Shiba's Word Meaning Comprehension Test that constitutes the version U2. Three forms of U2 were administered under number-right scoring directions, formula-scoring (correction-for-guessing) directions, and neutral directions. There were many omitted responses by examinees under formula scoring directions. On the other hand, there were few omissions under number-right-directions. Three treatments of omitted responses were examined in item response theory: treating as wrong, ignoring, and Lord's method. Great differences existed in estimated ability parameters among these treatments under formula-scoring directions, differences under neutral directions were minor, and one under number-right directions was minimum. It was concluded that formulascoring directions should not be used, since formula-scoring directions restrict examinees' test-taking behaviors and their performance is greatly affected by treatment of omitted responses under such directions.

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The purpose of this study was to construct the assertiveness scale for children (ASC). In the first study, 94 fifth graders answered to the original ASC, the social desirability scale for children (SDSC), and the agreeableness scale of the Motoaki-Guilford personality test (AG). Original ASC included 36 items covered 6 domains of assertiveness: (1) defense of right,(2) turn down of request,(3) expression of different opinion,(4) expression of personal limitation,(5) request of other's help, and (6) expression of positive feeling. Correlation coefficients were calculated and 18 items that correlated significantly with SDSC score and/or AG score were excluded from ASC. Finally, ASC contained 18 items significantly correlating with neither SDSC score nor AG score. In the second study, 238 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders answered to ASC and to 4 peer-nomination items that asked assertiveness of peers. Cronbach's α was, 77 and ASC score correlated with all peer-nomination items. The data from the other sample showed that test-retest reliability (3 months) was, 72. It was concluded that ASC had both reliability and validity.

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This study was carried out to make clear the mechanism of comprehension and memory of indirect requests. Undergraduates were required to process a short story, which contained either a highly conventional or a nonconventional indirect request. Subject's main task was to decide if the illocutionary force of the indirect request was the same as that of the direct one. Right away and 1 week later, subjects were every time given a recall test for the request they had read. The decision time was significantly faster when subjects had read conventional uses of requests than when they had read nonconventional ones. The result supported the conventional meaning model (Gibbs, 1981a) in that the subjects were automatically biased toward the conventional interpretation of nonliteral expressions. Moreover, the results on the two recall tests mostly showed that the surface form of the sentence was forgotten faster than its content, but the illocutionary force was accurately recalled even 1 week later. The results were discussed in terms of the conventionality and processing time of discourse.

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