The aim of this study (N = 24,012) was to explore sex and age differences in a Taiwanese national sample. We found that women, married, middle-aged, below-averagely and very-highly educated people reported higher happiness. In addition, sex interacted with marital status and education, while age interacted with marital status. Specifically, (1) men were worse off than women when widowed or divorced; (2) women with senior high school education were happier than men, but the trend reversed when they obtained graduate level education; and (3) married people were happier than their single counterparts during the suitable marrying age.

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The present study aimed to identify the differences between Japanese and Egyptian university students in psychological well-being (PWB). Japanese students (n = 138; 87 females and 51 males) and Egyptian students (n = 150; 84 females and 66 males) responded to a psychological well-being inventory. The results indicated that there are significant differences between Japanese and Egyptian students, with Japanese students scoring higher levels in autonomy and personal growth, and Egyptian students scoring higher levels in environmental control, self-acceptance, purpose in life, and positive relationships with others. No significant differences were observed for total psychological well-being score. We conclude that sex has a significant effect on self-acceptance only among the Egyptian samples, but has no significant effect in the Japanese student group. The findings are discussed in relation to psycho-social perspective and other cross-cultural studies.

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Students of English as a foreign language (EFL) often have difficulty managing the complex nature of the formation of questions and negative sentences. The present study used a timed sentence correctness task to investigate the effects of word order and the presence or absence of clitic negation (i.e., don’t, isn’t, won’t) on the processing of English negative questions by native speakers of Japanese. Two experiments were conducted, for both Yes/No questions and wh-questions. Each experiment included two correct conditions for the placement of negation, (a) (Why) Doesn’t Mary drive? and (b) (Why) Does Mary not drive?, as well as two incorrect conditions, (c) (Why) Does not Mary drive? and (d) (Why) Does Mary drive not?. There were no significant differences attributable to student level, or between the correct and incorrect conditions. However, within the correct and incorrect groups there was a significant difference in the accuracy of responses. Students found it easier to decide the correctness of questions in the form (Why) Doesn’t Mary drive? and (Why) Does Mary drive not? quickly and accurately. However, they had significantly more difficulty with questions of the form (Why) Does Mary not drive? and (Why) Does not Mary drive? Results suggest that there is little influence from L1 Japanese syntax because students judged questions using the structure (Why) Does Mary drive not? which places not after the verb and is similar to the pattern for Japanese negation, to be incorrect relatively easily. The fact that the forms (Why) Does not Mary drive ? and (Why) Does Mary not drive? were not accurately judged as correct/incorrect indicates an overgeneralization of the equivalency of clitic negation, and non-clitic negation.

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Psychological resilience refers to the human capacity to cope with distressing events such as abuse, disaster, and other stressful or traumatic circumstances. Previous investigations by using self-report questionnaires have focused exclusively on explicit aspects of psychological resilience. The present study investigated the relationship between implicit and explicit aspects of psychological resilience. We used a self-report questionnaire consisting of four types of psychological resilience scales as a measure of explicit aspects of psychological resilience. At the same time, we measured implicit aspects of psychological resilience by employing an implicit association test (IAT) that was designed to reveal participants’ implicit associations between closely related people (family member, companion, and friend), and calm/anxiety attitudes. Our results showed that IAT scores exhibited significant interactions with questionnaire scores. We discuss potential links between explicit and implicit aspects of psychological resilience in terms of the availability of companion as environmental resources.

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Recent studies on metaattention have demonstrated a tendency toward overestimating one’s performance on attentionally demanding tasks. However, the extent to which such metacognitive failures apply to all attentional phenomena remains unclear. The present study examined whether participants could anticipate attentional capture elicited by a task-irrelevant distractor during visual search. We measured attentional capture among university students and preschoolers and examined metaattentional judgments made by university students and the preschoolers’ parents. The students and preschoolers exhibited attentional capture. The university group underestimated their attentional performance, and the parents predicted that they would be less affected by capture than would their children. These results indicate that the tendency toward overestimating metaattentional capabilities is not a ubiquitous but rather represents a domain-specific effect. We propose that veridical metaattentional judgements can be made when the attentional phenomena in question relate to deficits that participants are able to notice in actual life.

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Continuous temporal changes in environmental situations in everyday life can be segmented, in the perception process, into events. In this study, we examine whether contextual segmentation affects visual perception. Fodor and Bever (1965) discovered the temporal synchronization effect on speech perception of contextual segments in spoken language. We converted Fodor’s auditory paradigm into a visual task by converting the auditory streams into visual streams, and the brief sounds into brief visual flashes. The detection of a similar temporal synchronization effect would strongly support the perception of a visual stream as the context of the visual event. We conducted two experiments using movies with natural scenes and edited scene segments to examine whether an explicit movie segment had a temporal synchronization effect on flash timing and whether changes in the action context had a similar effect. The results showed that the visual stream could be perceived within contextual segmentation.

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