The purpose of this study was to examine whether people who were mildly depressed and those who were not differed in terms of their self-referent processing of personal information. Twenty undergraduate females, 10 mildly depressed and 10 normal participants, joined in this experiment. First, each participants made a story about an ambiguous situation, in which the heroine of this story was just like herself. They then performed a self-referent judgment on negative personality adjectives. After the task, they were given five minutes for an incidental free recall test. Main results are as follows: The mildly depressed judged that negative adjectives more accurately referred to themselves, and they also recalled more adjectives. These findings suggest that mildly depressed participants were more induced into a negative mood by making a story, were more self-focuse, d and recalled more adjectives with mood congruency effects.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of importance, probability and urgency on affective arousal in goal achievement situations. The contents were 53 items extracted from factor analysis on goal achievement. Participants were 648 university students. Participants were asked to rate one of the affects (anxiety, surprise, relief, joy, happiness, anger, sadness, pride, shame, disgust, despair, hope) for each given achievement or non-achievement-items. The results suggested that (1) the factor of goal achievement strongly regulated the arousal of every affect except surprise, and (2) the factors of importance, probability and urgency of goal achievement influenced on the intensity of affective arousal.

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The purpose of this study was to analyze the coping behavior in the anger situation. The subjects were 312 junior high school students.
First, an Anger Coping Inventory for junior high school students (pilot version) was constructed by an open answer questionnaire. Factor analysis suggested that anger coping behavior consisted of three factors: attack, help, and suppression. Only the help behavior score differed significantly between genders (female>male). Moreover, the higher the anger frequency and the higher the stress level, the more frequently attack behavior was adopted in confrontational scenes. Multiple regression analysis was then conducted to determine the relationship between the anger scale and coping behavior in situations of expressed anger. Results suggested that males tended to show attack behavior when faced with dissatisfaction, whereas females tended to show suppression behavior. Finally, males tended to adopt help behavior in confrontational situations caused by friends, whereas females adopted attack behavior in confrontational situations caused by teachers.

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