The aim of this study was to develop the Brief Implicit Association Test for Autonomous Self-Esteem for Lower Grade Children (IAT-ASE-LGC) using emoticon stimuli and examine the reliability and validity. The test was a paper-and-pencil version that is applicable to groups of children. Participants were 2nd-grade (in Study 1) and 1st-grade (in Study 2) elementary school children. The reliability was examined in terms of a test-retest method utilizing Pearson’s correlations. Home-room teachers assessed their children’s behaviors to examine the criteria-related validity. The results showed moderate levels of positive correlations (r＝.68 in Study 1; r＝.70 in Study 2) in the test-retest reliability. Moreover, children with higher scores of the IAT-ASE-LGC were evaluated as having characteristics of higher autonomous self-esteem in terms of behaviors depicting autonomous and heteronomous self-esteem. These results illustrated the validity of the IAT-ASE-LGC. Taken together, these finding revealed that the IAT-ASE-LGC was developed as a reliable and valid test. Limitations and future perspectives were discussed.

This study aimed to quantitatively identify emotional words that are frequently used in criminal sentencing documents, and qualitatively identify the addressees, such as defendants, victims, and society, of these emotional words. This study analyzed 7,146 criminal sentencing texts between 1989 and 2022 that corresponded to “reasons for sentence.” For Analysis 1, sentences containing at least one of 31 emotional words were extracted based on a previous study. The result showed that the most frequently appearing word was “emotion,” followed by “fear,” “anxiety,” “regret,” “sympathy,” “sadness,” and “anger.” For Analysis 2, 100 sentences containing each of the above seven emotional words were randomly selected. Three sets of coders coded the addressees of these emotional words based on a codebook created for this study. The results showed that the characteristic emotional words for the defendant were “regret,” “sympathy,” and “anger”; for the victim, “fear,” “sadness,” and “emotion”; and for society, “anxiety.” Comparing these results with those of previous studies, the authors argued that there is a need for research that addresses “fear,” “regret,” and “punitive emotion” which have been under-researched.

In the present study, the authors developed the self-criticism and self-reassurance scale for youth. In Study 1, 290 junior high school students and 500 high school students answered the draft of the scale items, and it was confirmed that the scale consists of a two-factor structure (23 items). In Study 2, 940 junior high school students and 1199 high school students completed the questionnaire, and the test-retest reliability and concurrent validity of the scale were examined. In Study 2, the same factor structure as in Study 1 was confirmed and this scale had a good internal consistency and test-retest reliability (three weeks). The validity of the scale was examined in relation to self-esteem, depressive tendency, internal working model (attachment style), and contingent self-worth, and we confirmed the good validity of this scale.