[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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This study aimed to examine how information of crime occurrence, arousal of social norms, and evoking a feeling of regret promote crime prevention behavior. We tested whether providing three different types of information to encourage locking behavior in commercial bicycle parking lots would increase the security behavior of the parking lot users. We placed three different signs in the bicycle parking area for approximately two months and assessed the percentage of parked bicycles locked. The results indicated that when the information of crime occurrence and a message arousing social norms were placed in bicycle parking lots, the users' behavior of locking their bicycles increased. However, users’ bicycle locking behavior did not increase when information of crime occurrence and a message evoking feelings of regret were presented together. Furthermore, attempts to arouse social norms by presenting parking lot users with eyespots did not improve their security behavior. Thus, the results suggested that the combination of messages presented is important in promoting crime prevention behavior. Presenting information of crime occurrence and descriptive norms that people around them are locking their bicycles, enabled parking lot users to recognize the need for locking behavior, which, in turn, promotes crime prevention behavior.

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This study aimed to examine the relationships between the beliefs about how to learn or acquire teaching skills (beliefs about learning of teaching) and beliefs about effective teaching of teaching students. In total, 151 undergraduate students taking a professional teaching course participated. They answered two kinds of questionnaires: beliefs about learning of teaching and about effective teaching. Results showed three significant positive correlations between the necessity of learning teaching methods at university and active student participation during class, between how to learn teaching and active student participation during class, and between necessity of learning teaching methods at university and teachers’ competence in teaching and learning. The findings suggest that students who believe it was necessary to learn how to teach at university also believed in the importance of active student participation during class. The study also suggests that some students made much of learning teaching at university and acquiring competence in teaching and learning for effective teaching.

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Ueda and Yamagata (2023) demonstrated that when participants were asked to recall personal episodes for writing self-introductions aimed at giving either an extraverted or an introverted impression to others, their levels of extraversion or introversion changed in accordance with their self-presentation. This study explored whether traits not targeted for impressing others (i.e., the Big Five personality traits other than extraversion) also changed. A secondary analysis of their data (N = 422) revealed that in the extraversion condition, all traits exhibited changes toward more socially desirable directions, whereas in the introversion condition, only agreeableness and conscientiousness did so. The magnitude of change across the traits was correlated, suggesting the existence of a shared mechanism. These results suggest that recalling episodes for self-presentation may lead to broader personality changes, including in traits not explicitly targeted. We proposed several mechanisms that could explain the observed changes.

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Discourse analysis has played an important role in environmental policy studies. This paper implemented a systematic literature review to identify developments and issues in the discourse analysis of environmental policy studies in Japanese journals. It used an analytical framework composed of “types of environmental problems and major discourses,” “theoretical trends of discourses,” “discursive effects,” and “structure/agency influencing discourses,” which have been derived from international review articles on discourse analysis of environmental policy studies. As a result, this paper identified these four points: (1) the most common discourse studies have been applied to the study of environmental issues arising domestically, (2) the definition of discourse is unclear with few studies using internationally mainstream discourse theories, (3) there is little analysis of discursive effects on policies, institutions and movements (compared to cognitive effects), (4) few studies focusing on social structures and agency (compared to linguistic structures). Based on these results, the paper identified two issues for the development of future environmental policy research: (1) clarifying the definitions and theoretical positions of discourses and (2) increasing the number of analyses using primary data.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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The memory to which information is conveyed is referred to as destination memory, whereas the memory of the person who provided the information is called source memory. A previous study demonstrated that destination memory exhibits lower recognition performance than source memory. However, the source memory task may not be an appropriate counterpart for the destination memory task, potentially leading to increased difficulty. Therefore, replicating the finding that destination memory is more fallible than source memory using the same paradigm as in the previous study may not be feasible. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. Experiments 1 and 2 adopted the same paradigm as in the previous study. In Experiment 3, the source memory task was modified to serve as a counterpart for the destination memory task. As predicted, only Experiment 3 replicated the finding that destination memory performed worse than source memory. This study underscores a potential flaw in the paradigm utilized by the previous study and proposes an alternative paradigm with greater replicability.

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This study aimed to determine whether personality traits such as suspicion and empathy affect deception detection ability. We conducted an experiment based on the following two hypotheses: “People who are highly suspicious are likely better able to detect lies than those who are less suspicious” and “People who are highly empathetic are likely better able to detect lies than those who are less empathetic.” The 129 participants were shown videos of their turns to draw cards in the Old Lady card game. In the video, a woman randomly responded “yes” or “no” to the question, “Is this the Joker?” They had to answer whether they were “lying” or “not lying.” Thereafter, participants responded to a questionnaire measuring their suspicions and empathy (two factors: other-oriented reactions and perspective-taking). Multiple regression analysis revealed that, contrary to our hypothesis, personality traits such as suspicion and empathy do not affect deception detection ability. The reason that no significant results were obtained may be the need for an improved experimental method, such as the content and length of the false detection task used in the experiment.

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Assessing whether people are living comfortably and happily is in great demand not only in psychology, but also in such diverse fields as policy making and urban development. In response to this demand, many psychological studies have used a questionnaire method in which participants are presented with several questionnaire items and asked to answer them. In recent years, however, there are so many scales that measure the degree of people’s subjective well-being. To clarify which academic disciplines address these scales and to obtain suggestions for future use of the scales, this study conducted a review of scales measuring people’s subjective well-being and proximity concepts. We conducted a literature review using the Google Scholar and CiNii Research databases. After screening, we found 70 publications that were eligible for the review in this study. The specific constructs addressed by these publications were: 10 reporting on subjective well-being, 12 reporting on happiness, 10 reporting on satisfaction, 10 reporting on quality of life, 7 reporting on purpose in life, 11 reporting on emotions and moods, and 10 reporting on self-esteem. These were examined in a wide range of academic disciplines, not just in psychology. None of the 7 scales measuring purpose in life were translated from English, but rather the items were developed based on research with Japanese participants. Given the varying scales for subjective well-being and proximity concepts, the need for a new scale in this area should be thoroughly considered once again when conducting a survey. If a new scale is not highly needed, it is important to use representative scales that have been frequently used in previous studies. Our findings are significant for the appropriate use of scales on subjective well-being and proximity concepts by psychological researchers and for their proper advice to researchers in other fields.

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