The purpose of this study was to examine which facial part, the upper or lower half of the face, is more important to the perception of motion facial expressions. Participants were presented with motion stimuli of facial expressions of approximately 2-second duration. Different facial expressions of brief duration (either 200 msec or 330 msec) were inserted in the middle of those motion stimuli. Such momentary changes in facial expressions were confined to either the upper or lower half of the face. Participants were asked to categorize the inserted facial expressions into anger, happiness, neutral or sadness, or to rate apparent liking expressed in the entire motion stimuli. The results indicate that the important feature of anger (and, to a much lesser extent, of sadness) is expressed in the upper half of the face whereas that of happiness is contained in the lower half of the face.

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The purpose of this study is to assess the factor structure model and normative data of the Depression Self-Rating Scale for Children (DSRS). The study involved 2383 junior high-school students (1245 males and 1138 females). The four factor models (one-factor, two-factor, three-factor, and four-factor structures) were compared and tested using confirmatory factor analysis. The results revealed that the model proposing two factors had the highest fit index. This result was consistent with the result of a previous study on elementary school students. Analysis of DSRS scores indicated that the female students scored higher than the male students, and that the scores increased with an increase in age. These findings are quite consistent with those of previous studies.

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Recent developments in brain functional neuroimaging studies have established important physiological links between environmental stimuli and robust differences in emotional processing within distinct brain regions and circuits that have been linked to the manifestation of various conditions. Such techniques might enable us to evaluate information processing at the brain level in individuals by exploring the impact of genetic variation and provide an approach to perform functional genomic studies. Here, I propose that psychological and brain function imaging studies with concurrent biochemical and pharmacological measurement, in particular those investigating the effect of gene polymorphisms, appear to be quite useful in clarifying the relationships between emotion, brain and gene functions.

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In this article, recent researches on affect in social cognition are introduced and discussed. First, affect has an adjustable function and the ‘Feeling as Information’ model assumes the role of affect for daily judgments. An empirical study will be presented, confirming the informative function of affective states. Second, affect has a role of regulating the continuation and persistence of performance. Affective states provide information for stop-rule. Third, the relation of affect to cognitive style and the motivational function of affective states will be discussed. Fourth, a novel technique of measuring implicit attitudes using a misattribution procedure is presented. Finally, a SAC model, an integrative model of affect and cognition, will be shown and discussed.

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Potential benefits of the construct of mindfulness for the research in two interactive fields (emotion regulation and psychological treatment) are discussed. Mindfulness has a two-fold meaning. A mindful state represents “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p.4). In contrast, mindfulness meditation denotes specific intervention to actively control one's attention. Three directions for future investigation were suggested by these characteristics of mindfulness. (1) Detached coping as a common working ingredient of diverse psychological interventions, together with its attentional underpinning. (2) Potential benefit of focusing on one's body. (3) The importance of commitment to one's values in psychological well-being. Mindfulness intervention differs from existing psychotherapies in several respects. For example, it does not deliberately focus on distressing thoughts and does not mandate a standard interview format. In addition, it is easy to operationalize (to measure and to manualize). These unique features are expected to work as catalysts for generating new ideas in future investigations.

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