The present study was aimed at clarifying the relation between social comparison and changes in self-evaluation by young children, and at examining factors that may contribute to those changes.  In Study 1, 5- and 6-year-old children (N=63) evaluated the competence of self, ideal, and real friends in athletics, art, an intellectual domain, and a social domain.  In Study 2, 5- and 6-year-old children (N=67) evaluated the competence of self and a real friend in their most and least favorite activities in athletics and art, and indicated the emotions resulting from those evaluations.  They also reported their emotions when making competence comparisons with an unacquainted child.  The major findings were as follows : (a) Young children’s self-evaluations changed according to social comparison.  (b) Self-evaluations for competence in certain activities were related to the degree of preference for those activities.  The evaluation of competence of self and a friend varied with the domain of the activity.  (c) When young children evaluated their competence as lower than that of their friends, they reported having positive emotions, rather than negative ones.

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  By relying on phoneme information, adults who are native speakers of Japanese can recognize Japanese words even if they are pronounced with an irregular accentual pattern.  When and how do speakers of Japanese acquire this tolerance to irregularly accented words ?  To address this question, recordings of correctly and incorrectly accented words were played to 3- and 4-year-old Japanese-speaking children, who were then asked to choose the picture that represented the meaning of each word.  The 3-year-olds’ performance scores were worse when they heard incorrectly accented words, whereas the 4-year-olds’ performance did not differ between conditions.  The children’s literacy in kana was unrelated to their performance.  These data suggest that tolerance to irregularly accented words is acquired by the age of 4.  The results are discussed in terms of abilities that may affect this tolerance.

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  The purpose of the present study was to develop a scale to measure social skills involved in overall interpersonal relations of junior high school students, with consideration of the aspects of behavior (coding), cognition (decoding), and affection (emotional control).  Initially, an item pool was constructed from items selected from existing scales, based on the results of a classification of those items using the KJ technique.  Participants in Study 1 were 363 students in the 7^th and 8^th grades of 3 junior high schools (schools A-C).  The results of an exploratory factor analysis revealed the following 5 factors : behavioral expression, emotional regulation, emotional concealing, cognitive decoding, and cognitive monitoring.  The α factors were .70-.80.  Participants in Study 2 were 1721 students in the 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th grades of 5 junior high schools (schools A-E).  The results of a confirmatory factor analysis of those data demonstrated sufficient fitness of 4 of the factors, but not for emotional concealing (GFI=.94; AGFI=.92; CFI=.90; RMSEA=.05).  Study 3 was conducted in order to confirm the construct validity of the Basic Communication Skills Scale.  Participants were 220 students in the 7^th and 8^th grades of junior high schools A and B.  The results indicated that, other than the emotional concealing factor, the test results were appropriately associated with social anxiety, social support, and aggressive behavior.  It was concluded that the Basic Communication Skills Scale was composed of 4 factors, measured with 24 items.  These 4 factors were similar to a process model of social skills (Aikawa, 2009, in Japanese).  This suggests that the scale might be able to measure fundamental social skills involved in overall interpersonal situations.

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  The present study examined (a) whether various domains of school life could be categorized with respect to 2 aspects : a peer-relations aspect and a teaching/guiding aspect, and then, after these 2 aspects were identified, (b) differences in school adjustment among junior high school students categorized according to those aspects, and (c) relations between the 2 aspects and school adjustment.  In Study 1, analysis of questionnaire data from 822 students suggested that school life domains could be divided into a peer-relations aspect (“students’ relations with friends”, “view of classmates and classroom atmosphere”, and “relations with students in other grades”) and a teaching/guiding aspect (“student-teacher relations”, “academic motivation”, “views of career”, and “views of school rules”).  Analysis of the data also suggested that when students did well on one of these aspects, that aspect supported psychological adjustment and, partially, social adjustment as well.  Study 2 was a longitudinal analysis of data from 338 students who completed the same questionnaire in both the first and third trimesters of junior high.  The analysis suggested that there may be a circular relation between the peer-relations aspect, the teaching/guiding aspect, and school adjustment.  Specifically, not only were differences found in each aspect’s influence on school adjustment, but an influence of school adjustment on the 2 aspects was also found.

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  The present study discusses the relation between student nurses’ learning inside and outside the classroom, and examines conflicts between the classroom and clinical practica that student nurses experience during their training.  The following perspectives were categorized : (a) transfer, (b) an affirming apprenticeship model, (c) an emphasis on identity for learning in the classroom, and (d) the tension between classroom learning and on-the-job experience.  Interviews with 12 nursing students were analyzed using a grounded theory approach.  The results were as follows : In the classroom, the students were limited to following the textbook through interactions with hypothetical patients, even though their instructor told them not to.  In the clinical practica, the students found, on the one hand, that an advantage of using the textbook was that it helped them identify weak points in nurses’ practice, but, on the other hand, that if they only followed the textbook, they would fail. In other words, the student nurses were in conflict because they could not accept both what they had learned in the textbook and, at the same time, the actual practice of nurses.  From this, they realized that while the textbook was a tool helping them to identify weak points in nurses’ practice, what they had learned in the classroom should be applied flexibly to actual patients, rather than simply accepted at it was, because the textbook could not provide all possible procedures for dealing with multiple and changing patients in a real clinical setting.  This “third meaning” (boundary-crossing knowledge) is meaning that emerged from the conflicted relationship between their initial classroom learning and their subsequent workplace learning.  This conflicted relationship is discussed from the point of view of time theory, and a new concept of zone of time perspectives (ZTP) is constructed.  The discussion also describes exploratory learning through boundary-crossing as a learning environment that develops students’ practical wisdom.

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  The present study aimed to examine how 2 contradictory leadership functions of teachers—task orientation and nurturing—are integrated, through an analysis of the contents of teachers’ leadership behavior.  Elementary school teachers (N=191) completed a questionnaire on their own leadership behavior and their pupils’ task motivation, performance, and solidarity.  It was found that in the higher grades, teachers’ task-oriented leadership behavior (confrontation) was positively correlated with their nurturing leadership behavior (understanding).  The more the teachers implemented such leadership behavior, the greater was the effect on pupils’ task motivation, degree of compliance, and classroom solidarity.  In the middle grades, the more the teachers implemented nurturing leadership behavior, the greater were the assessed values on discipline-compliance motivation, degree of compliance, and classroom solidarity.  However, in the evaluation of the task motivation and classroom solidarity of children in grades 4-6 (1,037 students in 34 classes), only their classroom solidarity was consistent with their teachers’ evaluations.  In the higher grades, the mutual promotion of confrontation and nurturing was shown to be a practice that integrated the 2 leadership functions.  The present results suggest that these behaviors are influenced by differences in resources and tasks among grades.

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  The present study investigated undergraduate students’ engagement in the discussion of multiple authors’ works, including their responses to refutational relations between the authors’ arguments in their essays, and the relationship of that engagement to their understanding of intertextual relations, as well as effects of reading purpose upon those 2 processes.  Participants (95 university freshmen) read 4 controversial texts with the purpose either of understanding a controversy among the authors or of forming their own opinion about the issues.  After that, they wrote argumentative essays.  The main results were as follows : (a) in their essays, over a half of the students made no mention of the refutational relations or else illogically affirmed refuted authors’ points, whereas only a few responded in a logical way to all the refutational relations ; (b) the students’ understanding of the intertextual relations predicted their response to the refutational relations ; and (c) the students whose purpose was understanding the controversy were better at understanding the intertextual relations than were the students whose purpose was forming an opinion ; this effect extended to their responses to the refutational relations.

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  Secondary control has been defined as the process by which people change themselves in order to come into line with environmental forces (Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982).  Examination of secondary control may suggest insightful explanations of characteristics of psychological development in a collective society.  However, because researchers have interpreted and used their own definition of the concept of secondary control, it is difficult to integrate the results from studies of secondary control.  The present review explains that researchers have taken either a hierarchical or non-hierarchical view of the structure of the concept of secondary control.  The review also explains that there are variations in how secondary control can be distinguished from primary control, how to position secondary control, primary control, and relinquishing control, and the functions of secondary control and primary control.  Furthermore, the present review clarifies the difference between views focusing on adjustment to the environment and those that focus on maintenance of control, certainty versus uncertainty perspectives on the cognition of action-outcome contingencies, and self versus circumstances as a strong agency of secondary control.  Based on the conclusions of the present article, future issues are discussed.

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