In recent years, the importance of emotional granularity, which refers to the degree to which an individual can recognize emotions discretely, has been acknowledged. However, the methods used to measure it are burdensome, and a simple measurement index is needed. In this study, the emotional vocabulary size was proposed as an alternative measure, and a test to measure it was developed. First, emotional words were collected from the Emotional Vocabulary Dictionary, their discrimination and difficulty parameter were measured, the validity of the test was confirmed, and an item bank was created. Based on the bank, the emotional vocabulary size estimation test was developed using a computer adaptive test. When the validity was evaluated, the estimated emotional vocabulary size was related to the general vocabulary size and the tendency to recognize one’s emotions discretely. These results suggest that this test can be used to estimate the size of an individual’s emotional vocabulary, and may serve as an index of emotional granularity.

Regulating emotions appropriately is vital to our lives. Most of the self-assessment scales that have been developed to measure emotion regulation ability focus only on negative emotions. The Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI), a 32-item instrument developed by Preece et al. (2018), provides a comprehensive measure of the ability to regulate positive and negative emotions. The purpose of this study was to create the Japanese version of the PERCI and examine its reliability and validity. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted, and the concurrent validity and test-retest reliability of the Japanese version of the PERCI were checked; the results indicated that it was reliable and valid. Therefore, this scale can contribute to emotion regulation research in Japan.

This paper presents the results of replications of Asch’s (1946) experiments 1 and 3. According to Asch, people’s formation of their impressions of others is greatly influenced by their central trait with warmth considered to be the important factor. The results of this experiment have been quoted in many social psychology textbooks: that the overall impression of a person is determined by the description of the person as “warm” (or “cold”) regardless of other peripheral traits. In fact, however, it seems that “warm” and “cold” are not the only traits that influence people’s impression formation. In the present study, we replicated Asch’s experiments 1 and 3 (experiment 1, N＝71) and extracted the trait that seemed to influence interpersonal impressions through a preliminary survey (N＝69) in experiment 2. We examined whether these traits had a strong influence on forming interpersonal impressions as well as “warm” and “cold” (experiment 3, N＝73). The results showed that “warm” and “cold”; “polite” and “blunt,” which were considered peripheral characteristics in Asch; and “expressive” and “expressionless,” which were newly examined, all had a significant effect on impressions.

When people see a facial expression displayed by another individual, they experience changes in multiple components of emotion, such as appraisals, action tendencies, physiological and motor responses, and subjective feelings. Facial expressions can thus be regarded as emotion-eliciting stimuli. It has often been assumed that the kind of emotion evoked by a certain facial expression is the same as the one conveyed by that facial expression: e.g., a facial expression of happiness is thought to induce happiness in its perceiver. However, such “emotion assimilation” does not always occur, and observing the same facial expression can give rise to different emotions under different conditions. This complexity stems from the facts that the processing of facial expressions is a type of person perception, and that person perception in general is subject to modulation by various factors related to the perceiver, the target (facial expression), the perceiver×target interaction, and the context. Researchers have to take into account this variability when predicting and discussing outcomes of emotion induction by exposure to facial expressions.

Recently, research on positive emotions has increased globally, including in Japan. However, the difficulties of experimentally eliciting positive emotions have not improved sufficiently. This article identified three difficulties faced by researchers when experimentally evoking positive emotions. These trends include (1) the significant influence of context, including individual differences; (2) the undifferentiated nature of different positive emotions; and (3) difficulties in measuring bodily responses to positive emotions, which are calm and inactive. To overcome these difficulties, I have proposed the potential of field studies in which researchers can observe spontaneous, positive emotions in daily life by citing examples of cosmetics studies.