Emotional intelligence plays an important role in coordinating social interaction. This study investigated the effects of emotional intelligence on inhibiting retaliation for ostracism. Seventy-six university students (44 men and 32 women) played an online ball-tossing game called Cyberball (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000) with three other players. In the first session, each participant and another player were either ostracized or included by the other two players. In the second session, the participant had to decide whether to ostracize the other two players, who were the ostracism offenders in the ostracism condition, by throwing back the ball to the other player or not. The results show that those who have high regulation of emotions in the self, one of the subscales of emotional intelligence, better inhibited retaliation for ostracism. This finding suggests that regulation of emotions in the self can function as an inhibitor of inappropriate emotional behaviors in interpersonal situations.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the concept of “magical thinking”. “Magical Thinking Followers” are persons who believe in the effect of thinking. This research will contrast magical thinking to the ideas of positive psychology, construct the scale to measure it and investigate its benefits and pitfalls. With the aid of three surveys comprising data of 306 and 382 Japanese undergraduate students, a scale was developed. The scale was made of two factors: “a positive set of thinking and results,” and “a negative set of thinking and results.” Internal efforts of control to be positive were positively related to both of the two factors. Positive daily activities were positively related to a positive set. Dichotomous thinking was positively related to a negative set. Results implied that Magical Thinking Followers were more motivated to be positive persons partly depending on a naive dichotomous pattern of thinking mechanism.

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This study examined the mental construal process believed to be responsible for event valence. In three studies, respondents were exposed to future events, varying in their gains or losses, and asked to estimate the mental construal process and subsequent temporal perceptions or choices. The gains versus losses could be construed distinctly. People receiving gains were more likely to construe the event at a high rather than a low level of thinking. Therefore, people facing gains perceived the future time interval as longer than those facing losses and relied more on desirability rather than feasibility attributes.

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Native Japanese readers are known to rely heavily on visual codes and far less on phonological codes in letter processing (Mizuno, Matsui, & Bellezza, 2007). This study aimed to determine whether the lexical access of words written in kanji characters would parallel Japanese letter processing. Two experiments measured native Japanese readers’ performance on lexical decision tasks under three nonword conditions: orthographically misleading transposed-letter nonwords, phonologically misleading pseudohomophones, and standard nonwords. The results showed that readers’ performance was impaired by transposed-letter nonwords but not by pseudohomophones, suggesting that native Japanese speakers relied heavily on visual information and to a lesser degree on phonological information in the lexical access of kanji words. These characteristics of lexical access in native Japanese readers may be adaptations to the fact that Japanese kanji words have many homophones.

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