In Japanese, various writing systems can be used for part of a word that means “people with disabilities”.  The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of the writing system used on attitudes toward people with physical disabilities.  Undergraduate and graduate students completed questionnaires in which part of a word meaning “people with physical disabilities” was written in either hiragana or kanji.  The effect of the writing system that was used on the participants’ image of people with physical disabilities and their attitudes about interacting with such people was investigated.  The results showed that when hiragana was used for writing part of the word, respect for people with physical disabilities improved among those students who had had prior contact with such people.  However, there was no effect of the writing system on other aspects of their attitudes toward people with physical disabilities or on attitudes about interacting with them, nor on the attitudes of the students who had had no contact with people with physical disabilities.

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  Few research studies have focused on global life satisfaction and its relation to positive daily experiences among Japanese adolescents.  The purpose of the present study was to examine the relation between daily positive events and life satisfaction in early adolescents.  From diaries kept by junior high school students (N=20) for 2 weeks, positive events in their daily lives were collected.  A short-term longitudinal assessment of 763 students investigated a bidirectional causal relation between positive life events and life satisfaction.  It was found that positive occasions were triggered not only by socializing with friends, but also by being alone, and that the intensity of positive emotions varied, depending on the content of the events.  Analysis of the longitudinal data revealed that a lagged model, as well as a cross-lagged model, showed a satisfactory fit to the data.  Although the cross-lagged effects were not large, after consideration of the temporal stability of these 2 variables, reciprocal effects between positive events and life satisfaction could not be denied.  Effective interventions for increasing early adolescents’ life satisfaction were discussed.

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  The present study examined the effects of differences in concern/interest, a domain-specific self-concept, on individual differences in midlife development, focusing on 3 theoretically driven types of concern/interest, specifically, low concern/interest, high concern/interest, and distributive concern/interest, characterized by the domain in which each person is concerned/interested.  Study 1 assessed the validity of these 3 types.  Criterion-related validity and content validity were examined.  The validity of the 3 types of concern/interest was supported by results consistent with the theoretical hypothesis.  Study 2 examined the profiles of each type of concern/interest in relation to the participants’ awareness of aging and their process of coping with aging.  The adults with low concern/interest showed a lower level of self-awareness of declines associated with aging, and engaged less in psychological processes that aimed to cope with such declines.  The adults who were highly concerned/interested and those who showed distributive concern/interest showed generally similar trends.  However, in coping with a decline in psychosocial aspects, the adults with distributive concern/interest displayed an adaptive transition toward decreasing problem-oriented coping, whereas the adults who were highly interested/concerned tended to give up on attempting to cope.

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  It is generally known that evaluation of abilities through essay tests, interviews, and performance assessments may entail both rater biases, such as severity, dispersion of scores, and daily fluctuations, and examinee biases, such as expectation effects, order effects, and beauty of handwriting.  In the present article, an item response model is proposed for such data, based on the Generalized Partial Credit Model (GPCM; Muraki, 1992) for polytomous responses.  Effects of rater and examinee biases can be estimated directly and simultaneously through the proposed model.  Parameter estimation was performed via the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, which is becoming acknowledged as an effective tool for item response models. A simulation study indicated stable convergence of estimates.  Additionally, actual essay test data, in which 4 raters evaluated the essays written by 304 high school students, were analyzed ; the results showed the efficacy of the proposed model.

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  To test effects of practical training in the context of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), the present study examined changes in intrinsic, identified, introjected, and external regulation before and after practical training.  The study also investigated whether the observed changes could have been predicted from a measure of the participants’ satisfaction with respect to their psychological need for relatedness, autonomy, and competence.  Participants were recruited from a nursing-care course, with 117 students participating in a cross-sectional study, and 110 in a longitudinal study.  The students in both studies showed a higher level of intrinsic regulation toward nursing-care work after practical training had been completed, which suggests that the training may have facilitated self-determination in their work.  Additionally, results from the longitudinal study revealed that satisfaction of the 3 psychological needs through the training was predictive of higher intrinsic and identified regulation.  The results also suggested that a feeling of positive relatedness with the clients (in this case, elderly people) was the most significant factor related to improvements in the students’ self-determination in their work in the nursing-care course.

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  Primary/secondary control theory assumes a back/up model in which secondary control (SC) compensates for declines in primary control (PC) in averting depression.  In a series of studies, scales were developed to assess primary and secondary control, and then the back/up model was examined with those scales.  In Study 1, 798 respondents answered an open-ended questionnaire regarding cognitive strategies used in negative situations.  A questionnaire of items derived from their answers was administered to 564 respondents in Study 2.  Exploratory factor analysis revealed 4 factors : solution orientation, causal analysis, meaning acceptance, and thought adjustment.  Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the former 2 factors loaded on a higher-level factor of primary control, whereas the latter 2 factors loaded on a higher-level factor of secondary control.  Another questionnaire, including the primary control and secondary control scales as well as a scale of depression tendency, was administered to 645 respondents in Study 3.  Analyses of variance were conducted to investigate differences in depression tendencies between those with high and low scores on each of the primary/secondary control scales.  Significant interactions were detected between primary and secondary control, and also between solution orientation and meaning acceptance.  There were no significant interactions between solution orientation and thought adjustment, causal analysis and thought adjustment, or causal analysis and meaning acceptance.  On the whole, these results provide support for the back/up model.

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  The purpose of the present study was to investigate effects of a training program designed to foster fundamental thought regarding human and social matters.  The program, based on social psychological knowledge (e.g., impression formation, person perception, group discussion, and social skill training), focused on studying through experience.  Participants in the experimental group were 79 junior high school students (39 boys, 40 girls) whose school was affiliated with a national university.  Control group participants were 104 public junior high school students (52 boys, 52 girls).  The students’ interpersonal relationships, friendships, and adjustment to the classroom were measured by a questionnaire in a pre-post design.  The results were as follows : the students in the experimental group (a) had increased consideration and kindness for their friends, and (b) got along better with both high and low self-closure friends. In other words, after participating in the training program, the students in the experimental condition got along better with friends who had different characteristics of friendship from their own.

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  The purpose of the present study was to clarify the frame of the guidance process used by nursery school teachers during tag games played by the classes of 5-year-olds that they were in charge of.  Nursery school teachers (N=10) were interviewed with semi-structured interviews.  The data were analyzed using the modified grounded theory approach.  The analysis generated 4 categories and 14 concepts.  The categories were : (a) making the flow of play, (b) waiting for the children’s spontaneous participation, (c) making self-maintenance, and (d) accumulating experiences.  The category of “making the stream of play” was the core category, and was related to the other three categories.  In making the stream of play, the teachers actively develop the children’s play and wait for their spontaneous participation.  After those guidance actions, the teachers did guidance for making self-maintenance.  The category of accumulating experiences gives the play experience continuity and ties the other three categories together.

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  The present research examined an academic support approach to aid a ninth-grade student with borderline intelligence to solve arithmetic word problems.  His cognitive ability profile on the WISC-III was analyzed, as were his missteps in the problem solving process.  On the basis of those assessment results, 2 academic support approaches were devised : concrete object operation and key word presentation.  After key word presentation was applied, the student came to be able to solve the planning process portion of arithmetic word problems.  However, he continued to make careless mistakes when calculating.  Then, the presentation of prompts was introduced.  The present results suggest that when dealing with students’ difficulties in solving academic word problems, initially the focus should be on resolving the main difficulty. Following that, any errors that occur should be analyzed.

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  Various researchers have examined how accurately readers monitor their own understanding when learning texts.  In that paradigm, participants read several passages and are then asked to make predictions for each text about their future test performance.  The accuracy of metacomprehension is defined as the relation between the degree of participants’ confidence and their actual performance.  The present article reports results of a meta-analysis of a sample of 161 results of 63 studies from 39 articles, conducted to investigate effects of 4 factors that previous studies had demonstrated influenced the accuracy of metacomprehension.  The results showed that the overall median was +.270 (Q=.101), and that the accuracy of metacomprehension was higher (a) when standard texts were used, rather than difficult texts, and (b) when participants were asked for the degree of comprehension, compared to when they were asked how easy each passage was.  Although some of the studies reviewed had suggested that representational levels and task order had an impact on the accuracy of metacomprehension, the findings of the present analysis revealed that those factors did not have an effect.

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