In every day life, when we feel being deceived by someone, we pay attention to his/her facial expression and tone of voice. Three experiments were carried out by using undergraduate students. The purpose were (1) whether students can detect deceptive facial expressions from true ones, (2) whether difference may be found between men and women in detecting the deceptive facial expressions and in making disguise of deceptive facial expressions, (3) whether the results will be different or not in the following three conditions, 1) facial expression plus voice, 2) facial expression only, 3) voice only. In this experiment, "deception" was made by asking subjects to conceal negative feeling and falsely claimed to be enjoying themselves even when they watched the aversive films. Results showed that, (a) students could detect deceptive facial expressions, (b) there was no difference between men and women in detecting deceptive facial expressions, but there was difference between men and women in making disguise of deceptive facial expressions, and (c) no differences were found among the three conditions.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study was to find a latent structure of an acquaintance network in our world, or, in other words, to estimate the shortest communication channel between the "starter person" and the "target person" in Japanese society. A modified chain-letter technique was used for the experiment. A total of 200 subjects were randomly selected to be the starter persons in Fukuoka. They were asked to select one of their acquaintances to be an intermediary who would be more likely to approach to the target person who lived in Osaka. The same procedure was repeated until an acquaintance chain reached the target person. There were two target persons, X and Y. X worked in a famous company (F-condition), while Y worked in an obscure company (O-condition). Other variables among target persons, such as age, sex, education, place of residence, position in a company were controlled. It was found that a total number of fifty-five chains reached the target persons, with a mean number of steps equaling 7.2. However, the mean number in the F-condition was 5.5, while that in the O-condition was 9.2. Our world is unexpectedly small. In the former condition, people tended to use information regarding a target person's occupation and alma mater as tactics to select an intermediary. In the latter condition, information regarding a target person's place of residence and the breadth of acquaintances of an intermediary was often used for selecting a friend. There was a strong trend for male subjects to select male acquaintances and female subjects to select female acquaintances. The same applies to age and occupation as well, indicating that there are basic acquaintance networks in Japan such as same-sex, same-age, same-occupation networks.

View full abstract

This study is for a typology of social anxiety using multi-variate analysis. Social anxiety is a concept involving tension and embarrassment which arise in interpersonal situation and it is often studied related to self-presentational problems in recent years. In Japanese ,however, there are various expressions which represent social anxieties such as "Agaru", "Hazukasii", "Tereru" and so on, and this social emotion is considerded to have several forms. Accordingly a confusion is expected for the future studies without making patterns of social anxiety. In this study, 300 cases of social anxiety were collected on 63 graduate and undergraduate students by interviewing method and each subject choose the right expressions among 20 Japanese ones. When classified the cases from these patterns, 4 types were abstracted. Also, this typology was compared with recent ones and its usefulness were examined.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the contents of TV-news from the viewpoint of discourse analysis. We studied three evening news-programs during 20 days which got the high audience rating. First, we made an audience rating survey about three news-programs (subjects: 290 university-students), and an image survey (subjects: 36 university-students). We found that `amusingness' and `personification' of news broadcasting were connected with the audience rating. Next, we studied the differences of the discourse-structures of news among three programs. The results were that, in the program rated as most reliable, much information was given about main-events. In the program rated as most amusing, whose main caster was rated as a person of marked personality, more information was given about evaluation than about main-events. The casters had clear roles through engaging in a dialogue among them. This research showed certain relationships between the image of news-programs and the characteristics of news-discourse.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of social support in Japanese university students (male=220, female= 204), that is, both a main effect (direct effect) on psychological well-being and a buffering effect against daily life stress. A stress measure consists of four subscales, and a social support measure is designed with subscales measuring three support sources, family support, same sex friends support, and opposite sex friends support. In male students, same sex friends support had a main effect, and the other two subscales had no main effects and had buffering effects only against existential stress. In female students, all subscales had main effects, and family support had an inverse buffering effect that had a relation between social support and psychological well-being under low stress, not under high stress.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate what factors determined sexual attitudes and sexual behaviors. The scale for sexual attitudes was constructed by Wada and Nishida(1991) in the light of previous studies and consisted of three subscales (sexual permissiveness, sexual responsibility, and sexual instrumentality). As for sexual behaviors, the level of sexual experience between an opposite-sex partner and the number of contact with sex industries were asked. Personal backgrounds, parents' backgrounds, friendship, and social conscious-ness were considered to be determining factors. Subjects were 163 national university students (72 males and 91 females) and 87 private university students (46 males and 41 females). Major findings were as follows: (1) The more sexual permissive they were, the more sexual behaviors they experienced. (2) Male sexual permissiveness was determined by school record, socio-economic status of his home, and father's view of sex. Female sexual permissiveness was determined by age, commutation to university, mother's view of sex, amount of talk with family on sex, focusing on her own life and emphasis on her own senses. (3) The level of male sexual experience were determined by commanding money for a month, school record, having a lover or not, and socio-economic status of his home. That of female sexual experience were determined only by having a lover or not.

View full abstract