The aim of the present study was to illustrate the impact of childhood abuse history (CAH), experience of domestic violence (DV), and mental health problems on each type of child maltreatment (physical and psychological abuse and neglect) among mothers in Japan. A self-administered questionnaire survey was conducted among a sample of mothers (N = 304) and their children (N = 498) staying in 83 Mother-Child Homes in Japan to assess the mothers’ CAH, DV experiences, and current mental health problems, along with their maltreatment behaviors toward their children before moving into Mother-Child Homes. Regarding the mothers’ child maltreatment before moving into Mother-Child Homes, CAH, DV, and mental health problems were significantly and independently associated with child physical and psychological abuse. Childhood physical/psychological abuse was also associated with child physical/psychological abuse, but that was not true for neglect. The present study thus confirmed intergenerational continuity of child physical and psychological abuse in Japan.

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This study aimed to replicate and expand research on “Horizontal Hostility”, which describes asymmetric attitudes among multiple minority groups. In previous studies (White & Langer, 1999; White, Schmitt & Langer, 2006), two types of asymmetric attitudes were observed: (i) in relation to the similarity of the groups and, (ii) their relative closeness to the mainstream. The current study explored the pattern of Horizontal Hostility by measuring attitudes of a majority and multiple minority groups towards the issue of English education in Japanese elementary schools. This study defined hypotheses to confirm the findings of the previous research listed above and added a hypothesis which aimed to predict the attitudes of the majority group. The results supported hypotheses on similarity, and attitudes of the majority group towards multiple minority groups. Intergroup relations among a majority group and multiple groups were discussed in the context of education.

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Two studies tested the hypothesis that while Americans believe that happiness is an enduring positive state to be pursued by each individual, Japanese believe that it is a positive, but transitory interpersonal moment fraught with negative consequences such as others’ envy and a reduced ability to attend to one’s surroundings. Study 1 used a standard questionnaire method to show that people in Japanese cultural contexts have a more holistic concept of happiness than do people in European-American cultural contexts. Study 2 showed that this Japanese holistic view of happiness is associated with a holistic worldview rather than personal subjective well-being. This suggests that the holistic view of happiness is related to a dialectic thinking style prevalent in Japanese culture and unrelated to individual levels of subjective well-being.

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Consumers are faced with an enormous amount of information when making product evaluations. Faced with this difficulty, they often try to simplify the evaluation process by limiting their information acquisition. The purpose of this study is to identify two types of such limited information acquisition strategies (IAS), brand-based and attribute-based, and to investigate their characteristics in the product evaluation process. A computer-based laboratory experiment was conducted to gather empirical evidence. The results identified differences in time spent on processing each piece of information, the amount of perceived effort, and the degree of perceived task complexity depending upon which limited IAS consumers utilized. Specifically, the utilization of attribute-based limited IAS simplifies consumers’ information processing, a finding that is consistent with the previous literature. However, that of brand-based limited IAS does not necessarily make the task easy; in fact, it may make it difficult. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.

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It has been emphasized that understanding mental models is critical in problem solving, design, and reasoning. It also has been claimed that grasping mental models is difficult because mental models likely depend on our knowledge and experience. We focused attention on the transfer of mental models because we assumed that transfer probably has some common cognitive characteristics. In this study, the transfer group (A-B) and the non-transfer group (B) were prepared. In the transfer group, participants operated product A and product B in turn. By contrast, participants in the non-transfer group operated product B first. Operational time for product B in both groups was compared to examine how well mental models were transferred. We found that reducing the number of operational procedures could trigger the positive transfer of mental models if the other operational procedures were congruent.

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We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the timing and location of cortical activity related to perceived brightness. Participants passively observed 1 of 5 disks of different luminance (1, 3.2, 10, 32, and 100 cd/m²) during MEG recording, and rated the perceived brightness of the disk before and after the MEG recording. The perceived brightness showed an almost perfect log-linear dependence on luminance intensity. The MEG results showed that the stimulus presentation evoked neuromagnetic responses in the occipital region approximately 150 ms after stimulus onset. The average magnitude of the response was positively correlated with the subjective ratings of perceived brightness as well as the log-scaled stimulus luminance. These findings suggest that the neuromagnetic responses in the occipital cortex reflect subjective brightness perception and that the visual cortex completes the brightness assignment as early as 150 ms after stimulus onset. The possible clinical application of these results is discussed.

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