The present study defined legitimacy as approvability of others' or one's own rights to participate in managing commons and proposed two kind of determinants, institutional substance as a reference frame based on such matters as regal norms and perceived substance founded on a subjective estimation of others' or one's own desirability and the like. When an actor's rights to manage commons are established by legality as institutional substance, people will recognize their rights to be structured as a low variability. Therefore, their cognitive process for considering the grounds of the actor's rights besides legality will be disturbed. In this case, it is hypothesized that it becomes difficult for perceived substance such as trustworthiness to act as a determinant of legitimacy as a result of inhibition to attention. To examine the interference effects of institutional substance on perceived substance, a research survey was conducted to measure the evaluations of actors who participate in making policies for the prevention of red-clay flow at Onna village in the islands of Okinawa. The results indicated that the trustworthiness of actors promoted legitimacy when their legality was evaluated as low. We offer a theoretical discussion on the legitimacy of rights and its determinants around the management of commons.

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The present study examined the determinants of people's attitudes toward the Japanese government's income inequality policies. We focused particularly on people's perceived inequality of opportunity and self-perceptions of social class, and their effects on the perceived responsibility of income inequality. General survey data of 798 individuals indicated that when people perceive education/work opportunities as generally controllable through personal ability and effort, they attribute both onset and offset responsibilities more to the poor and less to the government, consequently showing less support for government intervention. Moreover, people's perception of social class moderated how they view opportunity: only among low-class respondents did the perception that opportunities are influenced by one's parents' income or their gender lead to the perception that opportunity is uncontrollable. High-class individuals, on the other hand, perceived the effects of parental income and gender on opportunity to be independent of the controllability of opportunities, suggesting that they believe that ability and effort hold strong power over general opportunity.

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Similarities and differences between explicit and implicit moods were addressed by examining the affective consequences of suppressing emotional life events. Consistent with previous findings, explicit mood (PANAS) and implicit mood (IPANAT) were similarly affected by positive or negative mood inductions. Interestingly, however, when asked to suppress their emotions toward a positive or a negative life event, participants were able to do so for explicit mood, but not for implicit mood. These findings suggest that although the act of emotional suppression leads to changes in explicit accounts of one's own mood state, implicit affect remains active, which unconsciously spills over to later evaluative judgments. Implications of distinguishing explicit and implicit moods are discussed.

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This study examined whether the norm of reciprocity, which implies that people feel compelled to return favors, plays a role in deterring inconsiderate behavior. We predicted that both gratitude messages, such as "Thank you for parking your bike in a straight line," and knowledge of the sender's identity facilitate reciprocation and thus deter inconsiderate behavior. Participants (N=191) were randomly assigned to read one of four descriptions. These descriptions reflected a 2 (messages: gratitude vs. prohibition)×2 (sender identity: clear vs. ambiguous) between-participants design. The participants subsequently rated the extent to which they were likely to engage in inconsiderate behavior in a given situation. As predicted, when the sender's identity was clear, the participants exposed to a gratitude message tended to refrain from inconsiderate behavior by invoking the norm of reciprocity. We also discuss the effectiveness and implications of the norm of reciprocity as a deterrent of inconsiderate behavior.

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The present study examined the determinants of the sentencing decision for a fictional murder case in which a member of the victim's family participates. Previous research indicates that people see others as more influenced by a victim's statements than themselves, and we focused on whether this asymmetric cognition makes the sentence more lenient or not. The scenario experiment targeting 147 undergraduate students revealed that the majority of participants viewed others as more affected by the victim's statements, and further found that this asymmetric cognition tended to restrain punishment. Attitudes against the victim participant system lead to denying the impact on the self. These results could support the idea that negative attitudes toward the victim participant system have punishment control through asymmetric cognition. Previous studies concerning judicial decisions focused on the assumption that victim participation arouses the judges' compassion towards the victims, resulting in more uncompassionate sentences for the defendant. On the other hand, this study suggests that victim participation could result in a lenient sentence for the defendant.

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This study focused on perceived relationship conflict and task conflict within groups and investigated the possible misperceptions and differences in preferences of conflict management behavior. Both types of conflict were manipulated in a crossed design with respect to their conflict level, resulting in four different scenarios (i.e., low conflict, relationship conflict, task conflict, and mixed conflict situations). Two hundred and thirty-one undergraduate students were asked to answer (1) perceived task and relationship conflict within each scenario and (2) preferred management behavior in that situation. Results showed that both types of conflict could be misperceived with regard to the other. Avoidant management behavior was preferred more in the relationship conflict situation than the task conflict situation. In addition, preferred management behavior in the mixed conflict situation, where both relationship and task conflict were strongly perceived, was the same as the management behavior in the relationship conflict situation. Differences in management behavior in each conflict situation were discussed based on the dual process theory.

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