[in Japanese]

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The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of explicit attitudes toward gender roles and gender of participants on male and female stereotype-activation. Twenty-seven male and female students were participated in the experiment that measured the gender stereotype-activation by a sequential priming task. Following presenting a photograph of a male or female face, a target word was presented. Target words were consisted of negative male/female stereotypical words, positive male/female stereotypical words and the words unrelated to gender stereotypes. Reaction time for the lexical decision of the targets was measured. Then, explicit attitudes toward gender roles were measured by a questionnaire. The results showed that both male and female participants activated negative male and female stereotypes regardless of the explicit attitudes toward gender roles. These results are consistent with the previous studies arguing the difference between stereotype-activation and stereotype-application. The discussion argued that the negative stereotype-activation of both outgroup and ingroup in terms of gender might be governed by the psychological process that also leads to negativity bias.

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A new screening test battery to assess the cognitive function for adult (NU-CAB: Nagoya University Cognitive Assessment Battery) was proposed. The proposed NU-CAB consisted of the items for memory, attention, verbal fluency, spatial ability, and executive function. All the selected test items can be administered not only for individual but also for group within 20 minutes. NU-CAB can be administered not only by neuropsychologists but also non-professional staffs such as community officers. The results of all test battery items can be shown in quantitative style and the items were selected by the criterion of practical validity, such as low cost, quick administration, and easy to prepare the feedback information.

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In this paper, I discuss the democratic meaning that A.Touraine mentioned the politics of Subject and the possibility of living with together in relation to questions under debate between liberalism and communitarianism. Touraine's arguments on the politics of Subject and democracy are very useful to criticize the various contemporary thinking, for example, conservative universalism and post-modernism, or liberalism and communitarianism. But, as both liberalism and communitarianism including J. Habermas and A. Giddens neglect an autonomous domain of politics that is distinguished from moral, Touraine's theory of Subject and democracy lacks concentration to the loss of alternative. His theory would may well be gone beyond him toward radical democratic politics.

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In this paper, through neuro-psychological tests and social-behavior disorder assessments, the researchers attempted to discover factors of recovery from higher brain dysfunction brought about by traumatic brain injury. The results of the study revealed that younger patients improve to a greater degree in semantic memory, complicated attention and information processing. Furthermore, shorter time periods in which the patient experienced loss of consciousness, revealed milder cognitive disorder than periods exceeding a month, which resulted in severe cognitive disorder. Additionally, the results also found that social-behavior disorder isn't necessarily related to the time period of loss of consciousness.

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The aim of this study was to examine the effects of biological or nonbiological cues on reflexive orienting. Twelve university students participated in Experiment 1, in which a target which was presented in the left or the right visual field followed the gaze face or the arrow and they were required to detect the target. The results showed that the response to the target presented at the side where the eyes gazed toward and where the arrow indicated was faster than that presented at the reversed side in the SOA-100 ms and the SOA-550 ms conditions. Such a cueing effect obtained for the gaze-cue and the arrow-cue disappeared in the SOA-1000 ms condition. These findings suggested that the reflexive orienting from the arrow as well as the gaze would accrue. Thirty-six university students participated in Experiment 2. They were divided into the three groups, and each group was given the following three types of localization tasks. One was the gaze-cueing task which was the same as the Experiment 1. The second one was the arrow-cuing task which was also the same as the Experiment 1. The last one was Kanji-cueing task in which the target followed a Kanji character which means "left" or "right". The results supported the findings in Experiment 1. That is, the gaze-cue and the arrow-cue accrued the reflexive orienting. On the contrary the Kanji-cue did not. The mechanism of reflexive orienting from eye, arrow, and word (Kanji) were discussed.

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[in Japanese]

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Although many studies have investigated factors that affect family caregiving burden in Japan and other countries, they have produced inconsistent results. The purpose of the current study was to explore which factors influence the burden of caregivers who cared for elderly family members. 60 male and 298 female family caregivers (aged range from 30 to 93) participated in the study. They completed questionnaires measuring caregiver and care recipient characteristics, caregiving environment and positive appraisals of caregiving support, and the Cost of Care Index measuring caregiving burden. It was found that caregivers with worse mental health (caregiver characteristics) and lower satisfaction with family members (positive appraisals of caregiving support) showed the greater levels of caregiving burden. Several suggestions for future research are provided in this area.

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