The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between moral conscious and self conscious emotion such as shame and guilt, and to investigate the neural mechanism of moral conscious using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Healthy adult participants were investigated with NIRS as they were presented brief stories including description of deviant behavior and were asked to image what happened before and after the stories and to write down the added stories of their images. There were three conditions: self deviant condition, other deviant condition and control condition. The story in each condition consisted of content related to social deviant situation. Self evaluation score of shame and guilt in self deviant condition was significantly higher than that in other deviant condition. The results also showed that arousal of self conscious emotion brought an increase of oxygenated hemoglobin concentrations in the prefrontal area. Especially, concentration change of oxygenated hemoglobin in the prefrontal area under self deviant condition increased more than that under other deviant condition. This result showed arousal of self conscious emotion would have been related to activation of prefrontal area. These findings suggest that it will be important to arouse self conscious emotion for production of moral conscious.

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The first purpose of this study was to confirm that the trust of middle and upper-middle aged people was higher than young people. The second purpose was to examine the relationships between trust and the higher brain function, and the satisfaction for the interpersonal relationship. Participants in the elder group were 304 middle and upper-middle people who were living in a rural community, and the participants in the younger group were 270 college students. The result indicated the trust for message of the other was higher in the elder group than younger group. In the elder group, it was found that the higher trust for the message of the other was, the higher the performance of Stroop task, D-CAT, and the letter and verbal fluency tests were. Furthermore, the more the participants were satisfied about the interpersonal relationship, the higher trust for the message of the other was. However, it was not indicated that the correlation between the trust and the satisfaction for support by friend.

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Although the anticipation skill of tennis players has previously been investigated, little research has focused on players' anticipation in a rally situation and in the presence of faked shots. In the present study, in order to compare temporal differences in anticipation between skilled players and novices, video clips of an opponent player who stroked straight or cross-course shots and faked shots were masked with a black screen 330, 165 or 99 ms before contact with the ball, at the moment of contact with the ball, or 99, 165 or 330 ms after contact with the ball. Eleven skilled players and 12 novices judged the direction of shots, indicated their confidence in their judgments and judged whether the shot was faked or not. The results indicated that regardless of when the clip was masked and whether the shot was faked or not, skilled players were more accurate than novices in judging the direction of shots. This suggests that skilled players utilized the opponent player's form before contact with the ball in addition to the course of the ball after contact. Moreover, signal detection theory was used to analyze the detectability (d' and criterion (ß) for judging faked shots. Skilled players judged shots as faked more frequently than novices before contact with the ball, although this difference decreases after contact with the ball. However, d' and ß, did not differ between skilled players and novices. This suggests that skilled players prepare for faked shots based on the opponent player's form before contact with the ball. The present findings will contribute to future study of anticipatory skill and the development of coaching methods.

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The present study examined effects of the perception of a communicative context on the transmission of information. The study specifically tested whether a communicator could transmit information for a recipient depending on the perceived relevance between the message recipient and the target of the communication. Thirty-six participants were assigned the role of communicator, and they were all informed that the recipient was from the marketing department of "Company A". In the high relevance condition (i.e., own product condition), the target was a computer made by Company A. On the other hand, in the low relevance condition (i.e., other product condition), the target was a computer made by a rival Company B. Results showed that communicators reproduced and transmitted a greater amount of negative information than that of positive information in the high relevance condition. In the low relevance condition, communicators referred to both negative and positive information in almost equal amount. This is interpreted that communicators could transmit adequate information depending on the perception of the relevance between the recipient and the target. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that the effect of relevance between the recipient and the target on the memory was mediated by the contents of the message and evaluation. This shows that evaluation facilitated the communicators' memory about the target. Characteristics of social cognition in a communicative context are discussed.

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We examined the influence of the present life style on suppression of unwanted memories and it's the strategies for 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s elderly groups. They were asked to answer how cope it when remembering an unwanted memory and fill out the questionnaire of life style. The results showed that the participants in high life events, compared to that in low life events tried to suppress unwanted memories with effort and use thought substitution strategy in order not to remember them, regardless of aging. Moreover, 70s, 80s elderly female participants in low life events less tried to forget and used the thought substitution strategy than that in high life events, but not in middle age group. These results suggest that elderly groups who have a lot of life events can try to forget unwanted memories by using any strategies in order to avoid thinking of it, but not that those who have few life events. Elderly person in low life style may associate with the present negative activities and imagining negative future happenings.

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The current report examined the relationship between implicit self-evaluation and ingroup evaluation. Although previous research has indicated that explicit self-evaluation predicts ingroup evaluation on each trait dimension, there has been much less emphasis on how implicit self-evaluation and ingroup evaluation are mutually interrelated. On the basis of the theories which emphasize the role of the individual self in ingroup evaluation (e.g., Cadinu & Rothbart, 1996), we predicted that implicit evaluation of the self would become a better predictor for implicit ingroup evaluation. Forty undergraduates participated in the study. We used the typical minimal group procedure (Tajfel et al., 1971), and all participants were randomly assigned to artificial laboratory groups. Implicit self-evaluation and ingroup evaluation were measured with Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998). The analyses revealed that the self and ingroup were more associated with positive traits than negative traits, indicating that the self and ingroup were both positively biased. These results are in line with the findings of previous literature, but there was no significant correlation between overall implicit self-evaluation and ingroup evaluation. Thus, the overall pattern of results in the present study was inconsistent with our prediction, but, nonetheless, implicit self-evaluation significantly predicted implicit ingroup evaluation on some Big Five trait dimensions. Namely, implicit self-evaluation was positively correlated with implicit ingroup evaluation on extroversion and openness dimensions. In contrast, they were not significantly correlated with each other on neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness dimensions. The discussion argued that these differences may be partly due to the significance of participant's evaluation of each trait dimension.

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The present study examined whether false beliefs on neuroscience among college students can be corrected by the class lecture of neuropsychology. On the basis of a within subjects experimental design, a 21-item questionnaire was administered to 30 female students from a school of psychology during the first class meeting in a semester as the pre-test and at the final class meeting as the post-test. The participants were asked to judge whether each statement was correct or wrong and evaluate the confidence in their response on a 5-point Likert-type scale. The comparison between the pre- and post-tests with respect to the overall correct response rate showed a significant effect. However, further analyses for separate questionnaire items showed that the majority of items did not show any significant change individually between the pre- and post-tests, with only two exceptional items showing the effect. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that the present results suggest the following. That is, although the class lecture of neuro-psychology discussed issues such as the methodology in scientific research, limitations of brain imaging, and refutation of false information in textbooks concerning the right versus left brains, it nevertheless remained to be a difficult task to reduce the misconception of false scientific information among students by lectures in classrooms. We also emphasized the responsibility that mass media is a powerful source of misunderstanding in the scientific knowledge among the general public.

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To investigate interhemispheric transfer of language information in left-handed participants, event-related potentials were recorded during a semantic matching task. The stimuli were prime and target word pairs sequentially presented to either the left (LVF) or the right (RVF) visual field. A posterior slow negative shift (SNp) preceding target presentation was measured as an index of storage of language information and an N400 attenuation elicited for targets was used to analyze the priming effect. The SNp developed over both hemispheres for RVF primes, whereas for LVF primes it declined over the left hemisphere. The N400 attenuation was larger in the right hemisphere than in the left hemisphere. The lateralized pattern of the SNp development and the N400 attenuation, which contrasts with the previous finding in right handers (Kato & Okita, 2008), suggests that the transfer of language information from the dominant hemisphere to the nondominant hemisphere is reduced.

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