The motivation for this research was to create product packages that better represent the qualities of the product. A method was devised for extracting colors expressing consumer taste impressions from product reviews and product information from brand websites and applying the colors to the original package image. A database was prepared for expressing the relationships between colors and impression words given by colors and then used to select two replacement colors per package. The feature colors of the original package image were replaced with the replacement colors on the basis of color discrimination. Experiments performed with 20 participants and four green tea beverage packages. The revised package images gave stronger impressions of product taste and information, better balanced expectation and satisfaction because of reduction in the gap between the impressions given by the package and the impressions after drinking, and increased purchase intention especially for new customers.

In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey (n=2,171) to clarify the effect of kitchen environment on productivity. Comparison of WFun and UWES by age, the percentage of kitchen workers with more than mild work functioning impairment and the percentage of workers with low work engagement increased with younger groups. Correlation analysis showed the assessment of sanitation were inversely correlated with WFun, which may be due to the increased awareness of sanitation during the COVID-19 crisis. Worsening assessment of kitchen planning, equipment planning, and sanitation increased the risk of transition to severe work functioning impairment by a factor of 4 to 10. In addition, improving the assessment of treatment and infection control increased the probability of work engagement shifting to higher engagement levels by a factor of 4 to 4.7. Analysis of the kitchen field survey showed that differences in kitchen planning affected the evaluation of kitchen workers.

To apply onomatopoeia to product design, we investigated the relationship between the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia and physical quantities. The target of evaluation was the operating tactile sensation of rotary switches. First, a subjective evaluation experiment was conducted in which participants were asked to provide free answers using onomatopoeic expressions related to their impressions of the operating tactile sensation. The obtained onomatopoeia was analyzed by quantitative text analysis using mora as the unit of analysis, and it was found that the phonemes of onomatopoeia used by the participants differed depending on the magnitude of the click torque of switches. Next, we examined the impressions of the onomatopoeia when the click torque of the rotary switch was sequentially changed via 7-point scale evaluation experiments. As a result, the correspondence between tactile sensation and onomatopoeia was grasped quantitatively. This paper shows that onomatopoeia can be used for quantitative product design.

The purpose of this study is to validate the ability of the digital device as a self-assessment tool for pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences. We examined the relationship of subjective ratings of the pictures by using a portable touch panel with a slider, with physiological responses (i.e., heart rate: HR). The results indicated that the touch panel ratings for unpleasant pictures changed simultaneously with the HR, while those for pleasant pictures indicated delayed responses to the HR. The findings of this study implicated the usefulness of the touch panel device to investigate emotional experiences on various situations outside the laboratory.

Of the dimensions that define perceived color quality, including hue, saturation, and brightness, hue is the most actively discussed, and in existing automobile industry research, there are very few reports on the other dimensions. However, in automobile design, brightness can be easily embodied by adjusting the amount of light reflection; thus, it is actively adopted in products. Therefore, in this study, the following hypothesis was derived; “light reflection brightness has a positive effect on purchase intention.” In testing the hypothesis, automobile designs with the same style but different levels of light reflection were created. Using these designs, a randomized controlled trial was conducted in a Japanese online survey environment. Consequently, the hypothesis was supported. The results also clarified that the value of light reflection does not depend on whether consumers attach great importance to design. This result contributes to expanding knowledge about perceived color quality.

When performing sensory evaluation, it is necessary to consider not only using a lot of time and cost but also human factors such as stress of subjects. This study focused on solution viscoelasticity and peel force. In order to link above properties with sensory values, we performed sensory evaluation for subjects to various samples with different properties. The obtained sensory values were averaged to exclude influences of individual differences, and the correlation between the obtained sensory values and measured properties was investigated. As the results, high correlation was obtained between sensory properties about “moist”, “refresh”, “smooth”, and “sticky”. Also, high correlation was obtained between sensory properties about “sticky” and “skin familiarity” and the maximum value of peel force measured during 50 cycles of measurements. Therefore, when evaluating skin feeling of skin toner, it may be possible to substitute skin feelings to the evaluation of solution viscoelasticity and maximum peel force.

The beautiful and magnificent light of aurora is said to be one of the most wonderful phenomena of natural resource that we can observe. In this study, from the viewpoints of mathematical engineering and affective engineering,we focused on the hue of light of aurora, and we examined whether it causes the human spirit any effects or not by using various statistical analysis and SD method. It is revealed that the flicker of this attractive light contains a 1/f fluctuation linking to cure effect on human mind. This research is the first basic trial turned to the creation of cure spaces for hospice and welfare facility.

The latent value of food has an impact on customers’ feeling to purchase and eat food. Our previous study revealed that the curry roux for home use induces an empathetic bond between people. A recent study investigated eating behaviors, and the author explains that a gathering movement may reduce uneasiness when eating together. We investigated an effect of stirring and gathering movements of curry through paired experiments (N=14) in two different eating styles: with and without the movements. Comfort was measured by electrocardiogram and Curve Drawing Method. Spoon synchronization was also measured as an indicator of empathy. The results showed that participants had a higher HF, a lower LF/HF ratio, larger surface areas of curve drawings, and a higher rate of spoon synchronization when eating with the movements compared to without the movements. These results indicate that the movements when eating curry together induce comfort and empathy.

This research proposed a model of cerebral blood flow responses due to work in a work environment. Based on the model, features were proposed to capture the temporal changes and localization of cerebral blood flows, focusing on the periodicity of the task. A method to remove the effect of environmental noise in the features was also proposed. To verify the usefulness of the proposed method, we conducted an intellectual task discrimination test in an office environment under a color environment. In the verification experiment, we measured the cerebral blood flow of participants using NIRS when they performed three types of intellectual tasks in four different color environments. We used SVM to discriminate the data of cerebral blood flow using the features calculated for each arbitrary segment. The maximum correct response rate was 0.717 after comparing the segmented interval, type of hemoglobin, and type of kernel function.

To establish an objective method of evaluating emotion which is applicable to the development of in-vehicle products, this study aims to detect driver’s “feeling of excitement” and “feeling of nervousness” by observed physiological indices. Assuming that “feeling of excitement” is to be considered a pleasant arousal emotion and “feeling of nervousness” is regarded as unpleasant arousal emotion, we carried out the experiment to verify whether the above two emotions can be distinguished by means of cerebral blood flow (CBF) and heart rate variability (HRV). Eight participants riding on a simulated self-driving car were presented with the visual stimuli with intention to evoke the above two emotions. The result showed that oxyhemoglobin increased in prefrontal cortex when “feeling of excitement” was evoked and decreased when “feeling of nervousness” was evoked, meanwhile SDNN/RMSSD increased in both situations. We clarified the above two emotions were distinguishable using measurement of CBF and HRV.

Improving texts by using rhetorical expressions is important when we write literary works such as novels and essays. Although expression dictionaries can help authors broaden the range of their expressions, these dictionaries are often exhaustive, and selecting appropriate expressions from them requires a certain amount of writing experience. In this study, we propose a writing support system that help authors improve their wordings by generating and suggesting improved sentences with rhetorical expressions. This system is based on the Encoder-Decoder model that generates sentences in a context-sensitive manner. As a result, we observe that our system generates different modifiers for a same word depending on each context. Through a manual evaluation by a questionnaire, our system was shown to be comprehensively useful for writing support. Furthermore, we showed that attention scores calculated in our model can be used to understand the relationship between added expressions and words in input.

Utility lines are sometime criticized as a prime factor in the unsightly visual impression of Japanese landscapes. This research investigates a cognitive bias leading the landscapes to seem to be wirescapes. Participants evaluated two kinds of landscape pictures: one with electronic lines and another where the lines were digitally eliminated. When evaluated side by side, participants showed clear preference for one picture over the other, typically strong preferences for wire-free landscapes, although when evaluated separately, they showed no preference. The findings suggest that people, at least Japanese people living in Japan, are insensitive to utility lines in their vision and that those who are exposed to wirescapes tend to form a similar impression to those who exposed to wire-free landscapes in a typical real-life situation, where a comparison isn’t readily available.

The globalization of corporate activities has caused corporate logo changes, such as company name changes and alphabetization of logotypes. Even in corporate logos of global companies, however, the logotypes are sometimes written in other languages or the symbol marks are sometimes changed in consideration of their social circumstances. In this study, we focused on the global company logos that use Arabic logotypes in some Arab regions, and considered their psychological effects. We conducted questionnaire surveys on corporate logo images for university students in Dubai and Japan. Factor analysis and rough set analyses indicate that the Dubai students feel the impressions such as “likable,” “familiarity,” and “lively” for the corporate logos written in Arabic, and that they feel the impression such as “global” and “potential” for the original English logos. The results suggest the effectiveness of local strategy of global companies in corporate logos.