The purpose of this research was to investigate whether a decrement in self-control resources caused burnout among employees with different degrees of autonomy. We conducted a panel survey among 424 employees. The results revealed that 1) autonomy affected the relationship between controlling emotional sensations and burnout. Controlling emotional sensations increased burnout among employees with low autonomy, but not among those with high autonomy. Moreover, the results revealed that 2) autonomy did not affect the relationship between other self-control behaviors and burnout. We discussed why a decrement in self-control resources caused burnout and how autonomy affected it, by referring to the process of self-control based on the Limited Resource Model, cognitive control, and physiological underpinnings.

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The present study investigated the impact of the narrative representation of trial information on judicial decisions and judgments about the victim among Japanese lay people. In an experiment, participants read 20 testimonies of a stabbing case. The implications of the testimonies leaned either toward a murder or toward a self-defense case. To manipulate the difficulty of story construction, we presented the testimonies either in a temporal or in a mixed order. The results showed that more extreme sentence decisions were made (i.e., longer imprisonment for the murder case and shorter for the self-defense case) when the testimonies were presented in an organized order. Consistent with this, estimations about the victim's likelihood of avoiding such incidents were polarized in the organized-order condition. Although the presentation order did not clearly affect some judgments, the results of our study strongly suggest that the story construction process has a substantial impact on judicial judgments. Cognitive processes underlying judicial judgments were discussed.

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Murakami (2009) demonstrated the tendency toward underestimating the possible success of uncertain events after "lucky" events in terms of "Luck Resource Belief." However, this notion does not necessarily entail a consequent decision to avoid a high-risk option due to low expectations. A "relativity hypothesis of luck" has been proposed to explain this tendency from the perspective of the relative value of several relevant events. This hypothesis suggests that a lucky result by itself does not carry a negative value. Indeed, when considerations include future outcomes, the value of the lucky outcome shifts, which demonstrates relative cognitive change. To examine this change and the tendency to assign value to lucky results, we distributed questionnaires (Study 1) and conducted an experiment involving predictions about the actual outcomes of World Cup soccer matches (Study 2). The results indicated that the occurrence of a lucky event before subsequent important events was associated with avoidance of a high-risk option only for respondents with a "Luck Resource Belief," because this belief involves devaluing the lucky outcome before subsequent important events. These results support the "relativity hypothesis of luck" and are discussed in terms of their implication for anticipated regret.

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Anger at the violation of a moral standard has been called moral outrage. However, recent research found that only when the victim of a moral violation was oneself (or a member of one's group) did it evoke strong anger. This suggests that the violation of a moral standard itself does not elicit anger, and such anger may be evidence of personal anger evoked by harm to oneself (or a member of one's group). In our study, we assume that moral outrage may be evoked when the likelihood of restoring fairness (e.g., compensation) is expected. We conducted three experiments in which Japanese university students read a newspaper report (fictitious) depicting an abduction case. For half of the participants, the abducted victim was Japanese; for the other half, Slovenian. After reading the news story, they were asked to report the intensity of the feelings of anger and whether the abduction was morally wrong. We found that the report evoked considerable anger only when the abducted victim was Japanese, regardless of whether restoring fairness was actually expected. This indicated that the reported anger provided evidence only of personal anger, not of moral outrage; thus, the likelihood of restoring fairness is not a determinant of moral outrage. These findings imply that personal anger, rather than moral outrage, is more prevalent in social life.

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As a result of decentralization, the role which local municipalities fill in Japanese administration has become still more important. In this research, the relationship between the perceived fairness of decision-making by municipalities and people's attitudes to the region was examined. According to conventional studies on procedural justice, it has been confirmed that people use group authority as a cue to the fairness of decision-making and their attachments to the group are strengthened according to that perceived fairness. We conducted a questionnaire survey of residents in Sapporo and confirmed that city personnel tend to become a psychological factor in the perceived fairness of municipal administration. In addition, we confirmed that people in a low-income bracket tend to strengthen their attachments to their region through perceived fairness and to hold optimistic prospects concerning their livelihood.

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The present study investigated the cultural equivalence of Self-Monitoring Scales (Snyder, 1974) through an examination of differential item functioning (DIF) using structural equation modeling. The data were collected in Japan (n=211) and the US (n=171). Factorial analyses were conducted on three factors of Self-Monitoring Scales: Extraversion, Other-Directedness, and Acting. DIF analyses were then conducted between the Japan and US data on five items in Extraversion, four items in Other-Directedness, and four items in Acting. The results showed that partial factorial invariance was confirmed in both the Extraversion and Acting factors, and strong factorial invariance was detected in the Other-Directedness factor; therefore, each factor of the Self-Monitoring Scales showed reasonable evidence for their cultural equivalence. Based on the results of the DIF analyses and factor mean comparisons between the Japan and US data, the cross-cultural validity of these scales was discussed.

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