On May 2009, laws came into force in Japan to enable citizen participation by introducing lay judges in criminal courts. Lay judges, who are randomly selected out of the electoral register, comprise the majority of the judicial panel to help decide the outcome in trials for certain severe crimes. To make their own judicial decisions, lay judges must rely heavily on moral intuitions that are often driven by emotions, due to the lack of judicial expertise. Under what conditions can lay judges, guided by their emotions, come to reasonable decisions? What is the definition of rational emotions capable of guiding reasonable judicial decisions? These questions must be answered to make the lay judge system feasible. Recently, Martha C. Nussbaum, together with Dan M. Kahan, has developed a theory of emotion-based criminal judgment. In this paper I am going to answer above questions relying on Nussbaum’s theory of emotional judgments.

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Creative Hopelessness is intended to decrease the client’s motivation to control the unpleasant thoughts and emotion in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The main aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the Creative Hopelessness on the subjective measures of believability and motivation of Change Agenda. Change Agenda is the rules expressed in the following lines: if I could control undesirable thoughts and emotion, I could solve the problem. Undergraduate students (N=35) with high social avoidance tendency were randomly assigned to Creative Hopelessness group, Control group, or Placebo group. Creative Hopelessness group received a psychological education about the futility of making efforts to control unwanted thoughts and feelings. Control group received a psychological education to increase the motivation to control the unpleasant thoughts and emotion. Placebo group received a psychological education of the general clinical psychology about anxiety. The reduction of believability and motivation of Change Agenda following the intervention were found only in the Creative Hopelessness group.

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The purpose of present study is to make Japanese version of the Repetitive Thinking Questionnaire (RTQ; McEvoy et al., 2010), which measures repetitive negative thinking (RNT). RNT is defined as attentive, perseverative, frequent, and relatively uncontrolled cognitive activity that is focused on negative aspects of the self and the world (Ehring & Watkins, 2008; Segerstorm et al., 2003). RNT such as worry, rumination, and post-event processing is seen as trans-diagnostic or trans-emotional phenomenon because it correlates with depression, anxiety, and various negative emotions. 107 undergraduate students completed Japanese version of RTQ and other self-report questionnaires. Exploratory factor analysis yielded one factor structure. RTQ and the short version of RTQ demonstrated high internal reliability and were associated with trait worry, negative mood, and non-adaptive metacognition for problem solving. These results suggest that Japanese version of RTQ and the short version have good psychometric properties.

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This study investigated the difference of impression between live and recorded music. University students (N=205) were requested to complete a questionnaire including scales of mood, affective value of music and evaluation toward the music after listening live and recorded piano music. The results suggested that live stimulative music maintained high level of active feelings and live sedative music increased relax feelings compared to recorded music. In addition, compared to recorded music, live music induced less feeling of fatigue. Moreover live music was preferred and appreciated compared to recorded music though no significant difference was observed between live and recorded music in terms of “brightness” and “speed”, which are the subscales of affective value of music.

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This study had two purposes: first, we investigated the factor structures of personality assessments, inferences of mental states, and behaviors toward an embarrassed person by an observer. Second, we examined whether these factors differed depending on the types of facial expressions of embarrassment. Participants were presented with scenarios in which a friend felt embarrassment. After reading the scenarios, participants were asked to respond to items regarding the friend’s personality assessments, inferences of the friend’s mental states, and the observer’s behaviors. A series of factor analyses revealed that personality assessments comprised four factors (“expressivity,” “sociability,” “selfishness,” and “inactivity”), inferences of the friend’s mental states comprised five factors (“puzzled,” “incomprehensibility,” “comicality,” “pleasure,” and “anger”), and the observer’s behaviors comprised four factors (“helping,” “avoidance,” “humor,” and “other-monitoring”). To examine whether these factors differed depending on the type of facial expression, one-way ANOVAs were conducted. They revealed that for personality assessments and inferences of mental states, the “sociability” score and “pleasure” score were higher for two types of embarrassed facial expressions that contained smiles as compared to ones that did not contain smiles. Moreover, for the observer’s behaviors, “humor” score was higher for facial expression that included smile and tongue as compared to ones that did not include those features. Thus, the presence or absence of a smile in facial expression affects observer’s personality assessments, inferences of the mental states, and behaviors toward the embarrassed person.

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Since the mid 1980s, subjective well-being research has blossomed into a major research area in psychology and related disciplines. Subjective well-being researchers have advanced our understanding of the correlates, causes, and consequences of happiness. Some of the early research findings, however, have been overturned lately. The present article revisits the early research questions such as the effect of weather, item order, hedonic adaptation, and money, and summarizes the most definitive findings so far on these issues. In addition, the present article summarizes the recent research on social relationships and perception, which helps explain why social relationships are so important in happiness.

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