Flow is an operational mental state in which people is fully immersed in a performed activity. The aim of this study was to measure in professional firefighters flow and its relationship with performance in tasks with a high risk component. The state of flow was assessed by the Flow State Scale (FSS) in six professional firefighters during a simulation of a traffic accident (STA), together with their expected and perceived performance. Results indicated that firefighters reached high levels of flow during their work performance in risky tasks potentially generating high levels of stress. Adequate performance values and a positive correlation between flow and expected or perceived performance were obtained. Quantitative results were complemented by qualitative interviews after STA. Data obtained emphasize the relevance of flow study in those professions involving conditions of high risk.

Cultural psychological studies have indicated that agency is less developed in Japan compared with American cultures. This study attempted to investigate changes of agency among Japanese youth. The Rorschach scores of 47 students in 2013 were compared with those of 47 students in 2003 in Japan. The 2013 group showed more direct emotional responses, fewer M responses, longer reaction time, and a greater number of undefined responses (e.g., “some kind of animal”) than the 2003 group, suggesting that the 2013 group was characterized by a weaker agency. These results indicate that the 2013 group shared the features with an autism spectrum disorder group reported previously (Hatanaka, 2013). However, they made undefined responses rather intentionally without any confusion, which stands in sharp contrast to the autism spectrum disorder group. This might suggest that the current Japanese students chose an undefined attitude in order to adjust to cultural changes in Japanese society.

The present study investigated underlying motivations of Twitter users for retweeting with a presumption that retweeting is a prosocial behaviour. Accordingly, retweeting were predicted to occur when an individual was motivated for prosocial reasons. In this study, prosocial motivations were classified into three categories of egoistic, altruistic, and reciprocity motivations. In addition, behavioural intention was taken as part of predicting variables of actual retweeting behavior and was investigated with other motivation variables. Participants were actual Twitter users who were recruited on Twitter, and data collection was done through an online survey. The results showed that altruistic motivation among three prosocial motivations could predict actual retweeting behaviour through behavioural intention. In addition, the differential effects of reciprocity motivation was found to vary depending on the sizes of the followers and the followees.

This study investigated the effects of age and cognitive ability on preschoolers’ understanding of the generality of their kindergarten script. Four- and 5-year-old kindergarteners (N = 106) were asked to produce their own kindergarten script and a fictional person’s kindergarten script at regular intervals. In Experiment 1, it was found that only the 5-year-olds reported fewer acts in the fictional person’s script condition than in their own script condition, and a measure of theory of mind (ToM) and vocabulary test were associated with the difference between the two conditions. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results of Experiment 1 by comparing a friend in their kindergarten condition with the fictional person’s kindergarten condition. The findings suggest that 5-year-old children are capable of understanding the generality of their script among individuals, and their ToM is closely associated with the understanding of that generality.