Previous research has found that, in successful situations, East Asians tend to feel less pride and greater embarrassment than Westerners. From a socio-ecological perspective, we propose that these cultural differences in self-conscious emotions after success could be due to cross-societal differences in the expected reward or punishment that others would assign to the actor for high achievement, which in turn stems from different levels of relational mobility. Supporting our theory, a vignette study with American and Japanese participants showed that (a) Japanese felt more embarrassment and less pride in successful situations than Americans; (b) the cultural differences in embarrassment were mediated by relational mobility and the expected punishment for high achievers; (c) the indirect effect of relational mobility and the expected reward for high achievers on pride was in the predicted direction but was not significant.

This study investigated the integrated teamwork model in organizations based on the survey data of 21 organizations, 812 teams, and 5,728 participants. First, consistent with the Input-Process-Output (IPO) model, the team-level mediating effects of “team leadership → team process → team performance” were confirmed. Next, we examined the further detailed relationships among the team-level variables. Our analysis demonstrated that relationship-oriented leadership was positively associated with daily communication, while task-oriented leadership was positively related to cooperation and goal sharing. In addition, goal sharing had a strong and positive association with team performance. Finally, we examined the interaction effect of task-oriented leadership and relation-oriented leadership. The analysis indicated a synergistic impact on which team process and performance were particularly enhanced when both were high, as assumed by the two-factor theory of leadership behavior represented by PM theory.

It has been shown that people tend to view opponents as biased. Recent theoretical studies showed that this tendency occurs due to naïve realism. People tend to be overconfident about their objectivity ─ they believe they see the world as it really is (Naïve realism: Ross & Ward, 1995) ─ hence, they assume that people who have a different view must be biased (Pronin et al., 2004). This study examines the effect of encountering clear demonstrations that personal sensory perceptions are not necessarily accurate on the perception of opponents’ bias in their social judgment through exposure to visual illusions. A total of 87 participants were grouped by whether or not they experienced visual illusions. Participants who experienced visual illusions rated opponents as having fewer biases in their social judgments than participants who did not experience visual illusions. This suggested that a person’s overconfidence in their own perception ─ “I see the world as it really is” ─ might be one of the causes of people’s negative perception of opponents.

Drawing on the literature about approach-avoidance behavior, this study tested whether asymmetries in the ways people interact with their smartphones using flick input (an input method based on swiping a key in a certain direction to produce the desired letter) influence their evaluations of the emotional valence of words. Specifically, a downward flick is regarded as an approach behavior in that the movement of a finger is directed toward the self, while an upward flick is regarded as avoidance behavior in that the movement is directed away from the self. In five studies, the predicted relationship between emotional valence and direction of finger movement on the smartphone was observed for nonwords and existing words. On average, words with more downward flick letters were rated as more positive in valence than words with more upward flick letters (hereafter referred to as the Flick effect). Of note, the Flick effect was not found among people who have never owned a smartphone, suggesting that smartphone use with flick input shapes the meaning of words.

The aim of this study was to investigate why certain youths identify with delinquent groups by examining specific factors that increase identification with them, such as intergroup relationships. Specifically, we hypothesized that the permeability of group boundaries would moderate the effect of group discrimination on identification with a delinquent group. In total, 96 male youths were recruited from four juvenile classification homes. The results revealed that youths who perceived group boundaries with lower compared with higher permeability cognitively identified with delinquent groups more strongly when perceiving group discrimination from teachers or the police; this finding supported our hypothesis. No other significant interaction effect was observed. Conversely, in terms of affective identification, we found an unexpected interaction between the permeability of group boundaries and group discrimination from peers. Overall, the findings did not support our hypothesis. However, some of the results suggest that delinquent youths may be able to decrease cognitive group identification by having friends outside of the delinquent group, even if they experienced discrimination from conformity groups such as teachers and the police.