With the promotion of the maintenance and utilization of domestic forest resources, a variety of educational activities, called “mokuiku,” which aims to raise awareness of forestation through hands-on experience with wood from early childhood, have been developed with a focus on “mokuiku” toys. In a preliminary study, through a survey and analysis of wooden toys, the author created an index that clearly indicated their educational characteristics and the relationship between children’s developmental stages and design. In this study, we created five prototype designs based on this index, and examined how they would affect children’s growth. The evaluation results of the experiments at the nursery school confirmed the educational effects of each of the prototypes on the nursery school children, including the development of fingertips, concentration, imagination, and coordination, suggesting that the toy designs created based on the indexes may promote children’s growth and development.

Focusing on the part where the laugh track is inserted from the highly representative sitcom of the United States and China, the common points between the United States and China regarding the point of laughter caused by “decoding the meaning of utterance” Differences are analyzed and considered. Use of “decoding the meaning of utterances” in the major classification items was found to be about 6 points higher in the United States. In the United States, it is a sub-category, “pride”, “unnatural metaphors and examples”, “explicit interpretation of what should be inferred”, “gap between real intention and tatemae”, “roundabout paraphrase”, “strange paraphrase”. In China, “pointing out the reality”, “detour”, “expanded interpretation” and “meaning is mediocre, implicature is dirty” were higher. The concept of “implicature premise”, “implicature consequence” of the relevance theory could be applied to the analysis of the insertion of the laugh track in “decoding the meaning of the utterance”.

In addition to convex dots and lines, concave dots and lines are used for ruled lines in figures and graphs in Braille publications such as in books and textbooks. However, no academic basis for the ease of distinguishing concave dots and lines in Braille publications. Therefore, quantitative guidelines of easy-to-identify concave dots and lines for people with visual impairments are required. In this study, we focused on ruled lines consisting of concave dots and lines, often used in Braille publications, and evaluated dot and line distances to quantitatively determine the identification of concave ruled lines. We found that a narrower concave point interval, such as 2 mm, was more easily identified. Conversely, narrow concave lines, with a line distance of approximately 4-7 mm, were more difficult to identify.

The purpose of this study is to propose a counseling system by introducing positive affect with the aim of reducing stress and negative mood. By using a chat system, it is possible to reduce the mental and financial burden on the counselor rather than face-to-face counseling. We examined three strategies as a means of introducing positive affect. The first is the scenario image strategy to change the mood of the reader by imagining the situation described in the scenario as if s/he were experiencing it. The second is the positive memory image strategy to tell others about his/her positive memories. The third is the negative memory retelling strategy to restate a negative experience as a positive experience. A Chatbot was adopted as the counseling system. As a result of the experiment, the positive affect value increased and the negative affect value decreased in the scenario image task. In the positive memory image task, the positive affect value increased and the negative affect value did not change. In the retelling of negative memory task, the negative affect value increased. From these results, the introduction of positive affect was successful in the scenario image strategy and the positive memory image strategy.

Although older people are regulating their driving spontaneously as a compensation strategy for driving abilities changes, seasonality of driving habits might be associated with self-regulation of driving of older drivers. This study investigates driving habits and preliminary destination analysis from the GPS data on private vehicles of older people to discuss the usual self-regulation of driving and the present regulation. For driving habits, driving distance and frequency in January and February decrease compared to the other months, and the decrease is associated with uncontrolled external factors as climate conditions (temperature). A destination analysis of February indicates that the “other” category such as a private house, office building, station, where associated with a specific and individual purpose, decreased in contrast to the results of April. Older people may self-regulate visits family, the community, and social interests while maintaining essential activities in the present situation.

Facial expression is one of the most important social skills for smooth communication. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty with facial expression communication and need support to acquire social skills. Therefore, we developed a training system for facial expression and a support system for recognition of facial expressions. In the training system for facial expression, we devised a user interface so that users can enjoy training by themselves. The user can make facial expressions according to the teacher’s image on the PC screen, and check his or her own facial expression and score with the PC camera. In the facial expression recognition support system, the user’s facial expression recognition is supported by displaying the expression of the person in front of the user in words on the smart glasses. These developed systems were evaluated based on usability, and improvements were discussed based on these evaluations.

In this paper, we analyzed the relationship between subjective and objective green view indexes obtained from a questionnaire survey of over 200 participants. By Welch’s test and estimation of the ordinal logit model, we clarified the characteristics of the distribution of subjective green view index and its relationship with the individual attributes of participants. Focusing on the difference between subjective and objective green view indexes, we found that the difference was influenced by the impressions that participants felt on the images. In addition, the impressions reflected personal attributes of the participants, such as “Likes and dislikes of green,” “Interest in green,” and “Green environment of the place of residence in childhood, now and future” affect the difference.

We today use E-books for reading, intellectual and emotional activities. E-books are characterized by reading using a variety of features, one of which is sharing with others, called social reading. In order to clarify the affective effect, we previously evaluated the impressions of social reading by comments and reviews. In this paper, we attempted to further clarify social reading by comparing the results of the impression evaluation (basic statistics, factor analysis, and customer satisfaction analysis) and correlation analysis. As a result, in social reading, comments and reviews are different reading, each with its own characteristics. That is, the comments were characterized by the effects of fun, better understanding, and new interpretations. The review also had features that did not increase reading time. However, there were some common features regarding readability.