Area-Level Income Inequality and Individual Happiness: Evidence from Japan

In this study, we investigated how area-level income inequality is associated with an individual’s assessment of happiness, based on micro-level data sourced from nationwide surveys in Japan. It was confirmed from our analysis using logit models that individuals who live in areas of high income inequality tend to report themselves as being less happy, even after controlling for various individual and area-level factors. The association between inequality and happiness is modestly significant, regardless of the choice of covariates at an individual level, and stronger at a lower level of perceived happiness. Moreover, sensitivity to inequality differs substantially according to certain individual attributes. Among others, an important implication for social policy is that those with unstable occupational status are more sensitive to inequality. Given that these people tend to be less happy than others, this result indicates the risk that area-level inequality further reduces the well-being of those with unfavorable employment conditions.     

Where Grammar and Interaction Meet: A Study of Co-Participant Completion in Japanese Conversation

This article examines the practice of "co-participant completion" in Japanese conversation, and explores what kinds of resources are mobilized to provide the opportunity to complete another participant's utterance-in-progress. It suggests the following observations as potential characteristics of Japanese co-participant completion: (i) Syntactically-defined two-part formats (e.g. [If X] + [then Y]) may not play as prominent a role as in English; (ii) The majority of cases of co-participant completion take the form of 'terminal item completion;' (iii) Locally emergent structures like 'contrast' and 'list' as well as 'unprojected' features of turn construction often play an important role in enhancing the opportunity for completing another participant's utterance-in-progress. The article then discusses the implications of these findings for the investigation of the mutual bearing of grammar and social interaction. In particular, the discussion focuses on what we can learn from the practice of co-participant completion about how projection of turn-shapes is accomplished in Japanese conversation.     

Spatial construction skills of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and young human children (Homo sapiens sapiens)

Spatial construction tasks are basic tests of visual‐spatial processing. Two studies have assessed spatial construction skills in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and young children (Homo sapiens sapiens) with a block modelling task. Study 1a subjects were three young chimpanzees and five adult chimpanzees. Study 1b subjects were 30 human children belonging to five age groups (24, 30, 36, 42, 48 months). Subjects were given three model constructions to reproduce: Line, Cross‐Stack and Arch, which differed in type and number of spatial relations and dimensions, but required comparable configurational understanding. Subjects’ constructions were rated for accuracy. Our results show that: (1) chimpanzees are relatively advanced in constructing in the vertical dimension; (2) Among chimpanzees only adults make accurate copies of constructions; (3) Chimpanzees do not develop in the direction of constructing in two dimensions as human children do starting from age 30 months. The pattern of development of construction skills in chimpanzees partially diverges from that of human children and indicates that spatial analysis and spatial representation are partially different in the two species.     

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

Previous studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial–Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. “bat”) than the opposite CL pattern (i.e. “tap”). This bias has initially been interpreted in terms of articulatory constraints of the human speech production system. However, more recently, it has been suggested that this presumably language-general LC bias in production might be accompanied by LC and CL biases in perception, acquired in infancy on the basis of the properties of the linguistic input. The present study investigates the origins of these perceptual biases, testing infants learning Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences, and comparing them with infants learning French, a language showing a clear LC bias in its lexicon. First, a corpus analysis of Japanese IDS and ADS revealed the existence of an overall LC bias, except for plosive sequences in ADS, which show a CL bias across counts. Second, speech preference experiments showed a perceptual preference for CL over LC plosive sequences (all recorded by a Japanese speaker) in 13- but not in 7- and 10-month-old Japanese-learning infants (Experiment 1), while revealing the emergence of an LC preference between 7 and 10 months in French-learning infants, using the exact same stimuli. These crosslinguistic behavioral differences, obtained with the same stimuli, thus reflect differences in processing in two populations of infants, which can be linked to differences in the properties of the lexicons of their respective native languages. These findings establish that the emergence of a CL/LC bias is related to exposure to a linguistic input.     

On muthén’s maximum likelihood for two-level covariance structure models

Data in social and behavioral sciences are often hierarchically organized. Special statistical procedures that take into account the dependence of such observations have been developed. Among procedures for 2-level covariance structure analysis, Muthén’s maximum likelihood (MUML) has the advantage of easier computation and faster convergence. When data are balanced, MUML is equivalent to the maximum likelihood procedure. Simulation results in the literature endorse the MUML procedure also for unbalanced data. This paper studies the analytical properties of the MUML procedure in general. The results indicate that the MUML procedure leads to correct model inference asymptotically when level-2 sample size goes to infinity and the coefficient of variation of the level-1 sample sizes goes to zero. The study clearly identifies the impact of level-1 and level-2 sample sizes on the standard errors and test statistic of the MUML procedure. Analytical results explain previous simulation results and will guide the design or data collection for the future applications of MUML.This research was supported by NSF Grant DMS04-37167.We thank Dr.Bengt Muthén for providing key references. We are also grateful to three expert reviewers for their constructive comments that have led the paper to an improvement over the previous version.This revised article was published online in August 2005 with the PDF paginated correctly.     

A TEST OF McCLELLAND'S THEORY OF ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION IN BRITAIN,JAPAN, IRELAND AND ISRAEL

Les auteurs tirent deux hypothèses de la théorie de McClelland, selon laquelle les taux rapides de développement économique sont sous-tendus par un fort besoin de réussite. La première hypothèse pose que les étudiants des pays à forte croissance économique manifesteront une préférence pour les affaires, et la seconde qu'ils se sentiront plus concernés par la réussite professionnelle. Les recherches ont lieu au Japon et en Israel, pays à forte croissance économique, en Grande-Bretagne et en Irlande, pays à faible croissance économique, sur des échantillons d'étudiants mâles d'université. Les résultats ne confirment pas la première hypothèse, mais confirment la seconde.     

Localization of electrocutaneous stimuli on the fingers and forearm: Effects of electrode configuration and body axis

Four experiments were done on the effects of electrode configuration (concentric vs. unifocal) and body axis (longitudinal vs. transverse) on localization of electrocutaneous pulse stimuli at the fingers and forearm. Subjects pointed to the apparent location of current pulses. For the transverse placement of electrodes, pulses were localized correctly, whatever the configuration and the body site might be. In addition, intrasubject variability at the forearm was smaller for the transverse axis than for the longitudinal axis. For the longitudinal placement of electrodes, pulses were localized as a function of configuration and body site. At the fingers, concentric electrodes provided precise localization but unifocal electrodes provided a great mislocalization; and intrasubject variability of localization was larger for the unifocal electrodes than for the concentric electrodes. At the forearm, whatever the configuration might be, the pulses were localized more proximally than the stimulus site; and intrasubject variability of localization did not differ between the configurations. These results are related to Boring’s anchor theory, apparent distance between two points, and the localization of other somatosensory stimuli.