This study examined how individuals adjust communal and exchange motivations for doing household tasks based on perceptions of the responsiveness of their spouses and its impact on relational and personal well-being in marital relationships. Toward this end, the study employed an eight-day diary survey. Individual slopes were calculated to quantify the degree of motivation adjustment in response to daily fluctuations in perceived spouse responsiveness. A follow-up survey was then conducted to evaluate relationship satisfaction and subjective well-being. The study analyzed data from 156 married couples using the actor-partner interdependence model via multilevel structural equation modeling. As hypothesized, the study observed a negative correlation between an individual’s slope of perceived spouse responsiveness to exchange motivation and relationship satisfaction. In contrast, however, the study found no significant association between an individual’s slope of perceived spouse responsiveness to communal motivation and relational or personal well-being. These findings imply that the adaptive regulation of exchange motivation in response to perceived spouse responsiveness contributes to positive marital relationships.

The burgeoning population of individuals that experience poverty prompts an inquiry into the lack of expansion of income equality policies, exacerbating economic disparity. This study examines the life hardship claims of upper-class people in response to class privilege information. We conducted two experiments to investigate whether or not upper-class people in Japan are more likely to claim their life hardships when presented with class privilege information and whether or not claiming these hardships would result in decreased support for income equality policies. In contrast to expectations, neither experiment indicated whether class privilege information influenced claims of life hardship. One potential implication is that the upper-class in Japan do not perceive economic inequality as an inconvenient truth. Moreover, the results demonstrated that the more strongly they claimed life hardships, the less they supported redistributive policies.

Research on priming effects repeatedly shows that human reactions are often unconsciously biased. Recognizing biases in one’s own reactions and identifying their true cause (the prime) is challenging, leading previous studies to conclude that it is difficult to suppress priming effects. This study investigates the possibility that directing attention to the causes of one’s own reactions might suppress priming effects, even if identifying their cause is difficult. An experiment using exposure to romantic priming influenced male participants’ sentencing judgments of a female suspect and subsequently biased their ratings of the suspect’s attractiveness in an impression evaluation task. However, the priming effect in the evaluation task was suppressed when the participants were asked to report the reasons for their sentencing judgments. The results suggest that directing awareness to the causes of one’s reactions can suppress priming effects. This offers a new perspective on the mechanisms of priming and controlling their influence.

At the beginning of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, infection risk was touted as controllable by avoiding contact with others, to the point that infected individuals were blamed for a lack of personal responsibility. This cross-sectional study uses an attitude survey to clarify how blame for COVID-19 infection has evolved over time. The results showed that, in 2020, infection was generally attributed to personal factors, in which certain behaviors were blamed. However, as the infected population increased, the disease was no longer perceived as rare. As a result, the blaming and exclusion of infected persons lessened, and the perception that infection “is just bad luck” has become more widespread. The study also explores the relationship between knowledge about disease and blame regarding infection.

Recent studies provide inconsistent findings on the relationship between implicit theories and performance. Such inconsistencies may have emerged due to the focus of previous studies on situations in which learners are assigned to specific tasks instead of addressing situations in which they choose tasks, despite the importance and ubiquity of both types of situations. Several recent empirical studies have proposed that holding entity theory, which views abilities as fixed, can exert positive effects on learners when they are allowed to choose tasks that align with their personal aptitudes. Therefore, the current study considers the availability of task options and the extent to which learners are free to choose tasks as environmental factors. Furthermore, we examine the possibility that these factors may moderate the impact of implicit theories on performance.