This study aimed to examine correlations among the synthetic House-Tree-Person drawing, depressive symptoms, and personality. In this descriptive correlational study, 186 Korean adult participants completed the synthetic House-Tree-Person drawing test, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and Patient Health Questionnaires-9. Persons with depression drew fewer two-dimensional body parts (p = .027) and rectangular primary walls (p = .011) compared with people without depression. Psychoticism was negatively correlated with two-dimensional house parts (r = –.21, p = .026) and active person (r = –.20, p = .027). Neuroticism and addiction were negatively correlated with two-dimensional tree (r = –.20, p = .030; r = –.20, p = .026). Impulsiveness was negatively correlated with central location of a house (r = –.20, p = .032) and additional decoration of a person (r = –.22, p = .019). Additional house decorations showed a negative correlation with empathy (r = –.22, p = .015) and a positive correlation with lie (r = .23, p = .013).
We developed a new high-resolution facial expression image database with multiple face directions and multiple gaze directions. This database was developed for usage as materials for psychological experiments and included six basic expressions (angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad, and surprised) and neutral expressions. Facial expressions in the database were formed in accordance with the instructions based on previous studies. To obtain the most expressive faces, models checked their facial expressions via a prompter, and we recorded them with video clips. After shooting, we extracted the most expressive images from the video clips. The size and location of the faces and lighting were perfectly controlled. With these procedures, we obtained 4,736 images in total. As a validation procedure, images in the database were presented to naïve observers: some of them judged the intensity of each facial expression and others categorized the images as basic facial expressions. Furthermore, personality traits of models were evaluated and principal components of East Asian face evaluations were obtained. This database, including the results of validation experiments, is available to researchers for non-commercial academic use only.
The scale error is a phenomenon in which young children try to perform impossible actions on miniature versions of objects. Previous work (Grzyb et al., 2017) indicates that children’s errors in the scale error task were associated with a failure to notice object size changes in a 2D looking time task. Here we extend this work to a more naturalistic environment, asking whether failure to detect size changes can be observed in the scale error task itself. Results revealed that the duration of children’s object exploration differed when the objects’ size changed from child-sized to miniature-sized. In particular, children who produced scale errors decreased contact time with the miniature sized objects more rapidly than those who did not. These results therefore offer the first evidence from an ecologically valid task that that scale errors may arise from a failure to detect changes in object size.
We spontaneously infer the social traits of people from their appearance. In the current study, the possibility that the perceived similarity of faces is based on perceived social traits, more specifically, evaluations on valence and power dimensions, was tested. Pilot studies provided the dissimilarity data of Japanese female faces with the similarity judgment task and validated them with a memory task. The current study demonstrated that two axes provided by multidimensional scaling analysis to the dissimilarity data could be interpreted in terms of valence and power dimensions. As participants were not explicitly asked to focus on social dimensions when rating the similarities of faces, the results suggested that participants automatically used social dimensions in the similarity judgment task. The present study suggests that the similarity of faces across social dimensions affects the perceived similarity of faces.