Previous research has found that Japanese people make relatively critical appraisals of themselves while their appraisals of others are relatively flattering. In order to find the conditions under which these two evaluation biases occur, 144 Japanese undergraduates were first asked to list ten attributes of theirs and then to rate the desirability of possessing each of them (self judgment). Next, someone else in the same class rated the desirability of each (other judgment). Subsequently, all the attributes generated in the study were shown to a separate group of students, who rated general desirability of possessing each of the attributes (consensual judgment). Results showed that relative to consensual judgment, self-judgment was lower (self-criticism), but other judgment was no different for those attributes that were consensually negative. For those consensually positive, however, self judgment was no different from the consensual, but other judgment was higher (other-enhancement). Based on these findings, it was suggested that Japanese self-criticism operated in a relational self-improvement process whereby individuals sought to find and correct their shortcomings so as to meet socially shared standards of excellence.
The purpose of this study was to propose an exploratory positioning analysis method based on a three-mode multivariate statistical model for analyzing semantic differential (SD) data. This new method can be easily implemented by using a structural equation modeling (SEM) program such as LISREL and CALIS, because the mean structure and covariance structure of this method are expressed as submodels of SEM. Two necessary conditions for checking identifiability of this model are shown. It is also shown that this model is scale equivariant for SD data.
It has been argued whether the facial expression is recognized categorically or dimensionally. We investigated this issue using three sets of morphed photographic facial images (happiness to anger, surprise, and sadness). Our interest is whether the experimental data of categorical perception can be explained by the dimensional point of view. Experiment 1 examined the facial stimuli generated by FACS. In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to discriminate some pairs of faces and to categorize the emotion shown one at a time. The discrimination accuracy between categories was better than that within each category. In Experiment 3, subjects were asked to rate those stimuli following the semantic differential technique. Then we examined the relationship between the discrimination accuracy obtained in Experiment 2 and the semantic distances obtained in Experiment 3, defined by Euclidean distances between pairs of stimuli in the factor space that was constituted two factors interpreted as “pleasantness” and “activities”. Discrimination accuracy within each category increased as a function of the semantic distances, whereas discrimination accuracy between categories remained high irrespective of the different semantic distances.
This study examined the relationship between cooperation and trust in interpersonal trust formation. Previous studies of trust and cooperation using prisoner's dilemma (PD) games failed, methodologically as well as conceptually, to distinguish the former from the latter. In response to the criticism on the use of iterated PD games, and for the purpose of investigating dynamic relationship between trust and cooperation, an improvement in research methodology was recently proposed: namely, PD with choice of dependence (PD/D; Kakiuchi & Yamagishi, 1997; Yamagishi & Kakiuchi, 2000). We conducted an experiment to compare formation of trust relations in PD and PD/D. Result indicated a higher level of cooperation in PD/D than in PD. Further analysis of strategies used to build trustful relationship, where two partners trusted each other and reciprocated the other's trusting behavior, revealed that participants in PD/D adopted “cautious and unconditional cooperation strategy” rather than TFT strategy.
Effects of focus on a target word during performance of the reading span test (RST) were investigated. A focus word in the sentence was defined as the most critical word with a core meaning to integrate the sentence. Two kinds of RST were compared. One was focus-RST (F-RST) in which the target word to be maintained was a focus word of the sentence. The other was a non-focus-RST (NF-RST) in which the target word was not a focus word of the sentence, although the sentence did contain a focus word. Results showed that RST scores were found to be higher for F-RST than for NF-RST. Moreover, the effect of focus was proved to be dominant for low span subjects. Intrusion errors also increased in NF-RST. Sentence length effect, however, was not found. The results showed that low span subjects had severe deficits in making and updating the focus, which is critical for sentence comprehension.