Part-time jobbers have recently increased especially among those who graduate from upper secondary schools owing to the reconstruction of their labor market in Japan. They are seen as having no purpose and low reality of their careers, as they often seem to say, "I do not know what kind of jobs are suitable to me. I wand to explore them and then I want to become a regular worker around them in 3 years", for example. This paper suggests that those who have lower resources tend to become part-time jobbers and therefore can do noting without emphasizing on their subjective aspect of career choice. They need to be constantly supported by adults and colleagues that they encounter in order to form their management of their own careers.

View full abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate how the degree of self-participation and not mental, but real, representation influences preschool children's remembering their own false-beliefs. It has already demonstrated that the rate of children correctly remembering their own false-beliefs increases under the procedure that they post a card of a representation. They thought the reasons why participation in the task and the real representations have an influence. In an experiment, I observed how three- to five-year old children (n=53) reacted to tasks equivalent to "Smarties" tasks. The effects of the children's participation in the tasks were controlled in stages, as were the real representations by stages. The results showed that children less than four and a half years old were not able to remember their own false-beliefs even if their participation was high and there were real representations. Children four and a half years old and over, however, had developed a meta-representation ability to deal with mental states as representations. However, development of meta-representation ability only was insufficient for children's remembering of their own false-beliefs. This indicates children require specific self-participation in the tasks or existence of real representations.

View full abstract

This study investigated how young children name or call themselves and others in pretend play. "Hoikusya, " in Japanese, are people who work in the areas of care and education in daycare centers or kindergartens. They were asked to count children's utterances of naming or calling themselves and others at nursery schools. These utteracces included proper names, role names (addressed to themselves or to others), role names jointed to (own or others) proper names, pronouns, and denials of their own proper names. In classes for over-one-year-olds, there were children who at 18 months began to use their own proper names for calling themselves, and all did so by the time when they were 24 months old. In classes for over-two-year-olds and over-three-year-olds, most children usually called themselves by their own proper names while the other six kinds of utterances were very few in classes for over-two-year-olds. Role names, role names jointed to their own proper names or to other children's were used by all children who were 38 months old. At this age, children sometimes use first pronouns, and perhaps in pretend play they deny their own proper names occasionally. It is suggested that although young children are good players of pretend play when they are in the age bracket of 18-months and about 30-months, they don't call themselves or others by role names.

View full abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate what kinds of distribution strategies preschoolers employed when the materials to be distributed were countable in a certain condition but were difficult to do so in another condition. Forty-eight preschoolers (ranged from 5 : 6 to 6 : 5) were given a certain number of small adzuki beans (18, 36, or 72 beans) in each trial and were instructed to put these beans into equal numbers on each plate (or cylinder) in front of them. The number of plates or cylinders was either two or three generating six different conditions altogether. In order to compare the results of the children, the same number of adults participated in the experiment to be required to do the same tasks. The results showed that children tended to treat adzuki as discrete quantity more often than the adults did even under the condition where the materials should be normally treated as continuous quantity. For example, children counted the beans before distributing them when the number of the beans was small enough to do so. However, some participants were ready to estimate the quotient in advance and did not count the beans be fore putting beans into transparent cylinders especially when they were given 72 beans at their first trial. When they had to distribute beans into plates instead of cylinders, they tended to count them one by one regardless of the number of the beans to be distributed. A reddish-brown adzuki bean is about two to three millimeters in diameter and is never sold by its numbers. That means it is normally uncountable when there are more than a certain amount of quantity. It was shown that at least some of the preschool children recognized plural strategies and used the appropriate one depending on the condition of the number of the materials to be divided, and also on the condition of whether the object to which the beans would be distributed was a plate or a cylinder. It was also discussed how informal mathematical knowledge would be constructed in early childhood.

View full abstract

Research on theory of mind has increased for the last twenty years. Many researchers have refined on the "false belief" task in order to demonstrate that younger children can understand the representational mind. Nevertheless, they have not deliberated how the self is differentiated from the other and how self/other knowledge is acquired. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical studies on young children's "temporally extended self"(Neisser, 1988) and its relation to self/other understanding in terms of temporal perspectives. It starts by highlighting children's understanding of the connection between the past and the present self. Then it is argued that, if made a few modifications, delayed self-recognition task should be an adequate one to assess the "attitude toward the absent objects". Secondly, it is presumed that other's temporally extended self is understood later than one's own. Finally, this paper proposes a new version of "Sally-Ann" task, which examines children's abilities to understand temporal change of other's mind.

View full abstract

Thanks to the valuable works by the brain scientist A. R. Damasio (1994, 1999) that underlined the bodily bases for feelings, the correlation between the feeling and the body is receiving much attention today. In this paper I first discussed the significance of his theory as well as Wallon's theory of feelings (1932), which has so far been paid comparatively little attention in the English-speaking sphere. Next I argued that Wallon's theory of feelings is basically a theory of mutually coordinating interaction between center and periphery, and that it is quite different from James-Lange or Cannon-Bard theories. Then I proceeded to consider the various phenomena that I called "not corresponding feelings" and regarded as manifestations of what Wallon discussed in the theory, and classified them under four categories, in the hope that the classification will serve as a theoretical basis for future case-gathering efforts. The first of the categories I called "the feelings toward undefined subjects", under which come Freud's "anxiety", Damasio's "background emotions", and the emotional effects relevant to "the postural functions" that Wallon discussed. The second category was called "remaining and alteration". Anderson's study on the primacy effect (1965), the perseverance effect by Ross, Lepper and Hubbard (1975), and the non-effect of mitigating information by Zillman and Cantor (1976) are the instances of "remaining" I gave, and the suspension-bridge experiment by Dutton and Aron (1974) and the sexual attraction study by Dienstbier, R. A. (1979) come under "alteration". The third was called "strengthening and weakening". "strengthening" was seen, for instance, in a phenomenon when a laughter (or crying) is so compulsive it cannot be stopped, but I could not identify any studies on this subject. An example of the "weakening", on the other hand, was found in the survey by Bowlby (1979) on convalescent processes from the loss of a parent or spouse, which indicates crying is effective in alleviating grief. My argument is that the "weakening" phenomena is contradictory to both the James-Lange theory and the Cannon-Bard theory and can only be explained by the theory of mutually coordinating interaction. The fourth is "deviant expression", which includes such phenomena as tears out of anger or laughter, laughter out of extreme fear, and aggressive behavior as expression of joy, the last of which may be illustrated by some of the behaviors of the C type children in Ainsworth et al.'s SS method. Very few studies have been done on the subject, leaving a great deal of room for future research. I gave some examples of "deviant expression" I observed among children at nursing school. My overall conclusion is that theories on feelings today should be some kinds of revised two-factor theory-they, while recognizing the role of cognition in the formation of emotion emphasized in the two-factor theory by Schachter and Singer (1962), the theories of cognitive appraisal by Roseman et al. (1990), Smith and Lazarus (1993) and Scherer (1984, 1992, 1993), and the theory of secondary emotion by Damasio (1999), should also take the theory of mutually coordinating interaction of Wallon (1932) fully into consideration.

View full abstract