This study examined the relationship between children’s moral judgments about pretend crying and their understanding of mental states. Thirty-three 6-year-old Japanese children were individually given pretend crying tasks involving a “harm” story and a “harm-free” story, theory of mind tasks, hidden emotion tasks, and a vocabulary test. In the harm story, the protagonist pretended to cry after accidentally being bumped by another character. In the harm-free story, the protagonist pretended to cry because of a purely personal motivation. The results showed that understanding of hidden emotions was correlated with negative judgments about the pretend crying in the harm story, whereas theory of mind was correlated with negative judgments in the harm-free story. The interface between social understanding and morality is discussed.

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This experiment investigated whether affective information from unfamiliar people can influence the affective ratings for unfamiliar foods, before and after participants have ate the foods. The participants rated a food product’s appearance in terms of how palatable it looked on a 7-point Likert scale before they had eaten it (affective expectation). They also rated how palatable the food actually was after they had eaten it (affective evaluation). Results showed that there was a significant interaction between when participants provided the ratings and whether they had been informed of other people’s affective evaluation. Exposure to affective information did not influence affective expectation, but it did increase affective evaluation. These results suggest that affective information that is presented simultaneously with a visual experience might only be influential when perceivers are able to test the information through their perceptual experience.

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Prior studies have investigated whether the expectation that one will explain materials promotes text comprehension during learning. Such research, however, has had inconsistent results, which suggests that the effects of explanation expectancy depend on individual difference factors. In the present study, an experiment with 8th-grade students examined whether their metacognitive knowledge about explanation (elaborative explaining orientation) moderated the effects of explanation expectancy on text comprehension. Before studying the text, students in the experimental condition were instructed that they would have to explain the content of the text to another person. All the students then read the text, and answered test questions. Students in the experimental group had low text comprehension scores, but only for students with low orientation to elaborate and organize a passage when explaining. The findings demonstrated that moderating factors including metacognitive knowledge about explanation could cause the inconsistent results of previous research.

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Although it has been reported that making a speech without an audience does not cause a significant cortisol response, there is no study that compares no-audience speech to a rest condition. We randomly assigned Japanese female participants (n = 81) to three conditions: (a) making an improvised speech in front of an audience (audience condition); (b) making such a speech without an audience (no-audience condition); (c) merely listening to such a speech (rest condition). The no-audience condition elicited stronger negative psychological responses to the speech than the rest condition, but these response changes were smaller than those of the audience group. Salivary cortisol levels in the audience condition increased, but that of the no-audience condition decreased to levels not significantly different from that of the rest condition. These results showed that making an improvised speech without an audience causes psychological stress to some extent, but the response of cortisol is similar to the rest condition.

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