Conflict management and organizational attitudes among Japanese: individual and group goals and justice

By asking 341 Japanese employees to rate experiences of conflict with their supervisors in terms of conflict concerns and outcomes, we attempted to examine the following two hypotheses: attainment of the individual and group goals would increase the perceived justice (H2), and the perceived justice would increase the outcome satisfaction and organizational commitment (H1: the justice-bond hypothesis). The results of structural equation analysis supported H1, but only partially supported H2; that is, only the group goals increased the perceived justice. Instead, the individual goals directly increased the outcome satisfaction, not by way of the perception of justice. These findings suggest that Japanese employees felt that justice was achieved when they saw the conflicts were resolved in the group-oriented manner, relatively independent of personal interests.     

Multi-Encoding for Pitch Information of Tone Sequences

This study was designed to investigate the possibilities that subjects would visualize an auditory contour as a visual contour (visual imagery) to encode pitch information of tone sequences (Experiment 1), and that subjects would be motivated to attempt to engage in covert rehearsal with multi-code (Experiment 2). The findings from these experiments suggest that: (a) Whereas the highly musically trained subjects were able to encode pitches as accurate notes on a staff, the less well musically trained subjects encoded the pitch sequence as a contour. It is quite evident that there is an intermodal analogy between the perception of pitch relationships and that of relationships in visual space. (b) Pitch rehearsal of auditory information along with note names (dual-code) and staff notation accompanied by pitch rehearsal with note names (triple-code) were the most effective strategies for highly trained subjects with pitches of tonal sequences; melodic contour accompanied by pitch rehearsal (dual-code) was used by highly trained subjects with atonal sequences and by less well trained subjects with both types of sequences.     

Clustering preference data in the presence of response-style bias

Preference data, such as Likert scale data, are often obtained in questionnaire-based surveys. Clustering respondents based on survey items is useful for discovering latent structures. However, cluster analysis of preference data may be affected by response styles, that is, a respondent's systematic response tendencies irrespective of the item content. For example, some respondents may tend to select ratings at the ends of the scale, which is called an ‘extreme response style’. A cluster of respondents with an extreme response style can be mistakenly identified as a content-based cluster. To address this problem, we propose a novel method of clustering respondents based on their indicated preferences for a set of items while correcting for response-style bias. We first introduce a new framework to detect, and correct for, response styles by generalizing the definition of response styles used in constrained dual scaling. We then simultaneously correct for response styles and perform a cluster analysis based on the corrected preference data. A simulation study shows that the proposed method yields better clustering accuracy than the existing methods do. We apply the method to empirical data from four different countries concerning social values.     

Developmental fractionation of working memory and response inhibition during childhood

The lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) plays a major role in both working memory (WM) and response inhibition (RI), which are fundamental for various cognitive abilities. We explored the relationship between these LPFC functions during childhood development by examining the performance of two groups of children in visuospatial and auditory WM tasks and a go/no-go RI task. In the younger children (59 5- and 6-year-olds), performance on the visuospatial WM task correlated significantly with that in the auditory WM task. Furthermore, accuracy in these tasks correlated significantly with performance on the RI task, particularly in the no-go trials. In contrast, there were no significant correlations among those tasks in older children (92 8- and 9-year-olds). These results suggest that functional neural systems for visuospatial WM, auditory WM, and RI, especially those in the LPFC, become fractionated during childhood, thereby enabling more efficient processing of these critical cognitive functions.     

Effect of focus on verbal working memory: Critical role of the focus word in reading

The effect of focus on working memory was investigated with the reading span test (RST). In two experiments, the span scores and the number of intrusion errors were compared between the focused RST the and the nonfocused RST. Focus word was defined as the most important word for comprehending a sentence. For the focused RST, the target word to be maintained was the focus word for the sentence. In the nonfocused RST, however, the target word was not the focus word for the sentence. The results of both experiments showed that RST span scores were higher for the focused RST than for the nonfocused RST, and intrusion errors were found to increase for the nonfocused RST. In Experiment 2, the effect of focus was compared between high-span and low-span subjects. An effect of sentence length was also investigated. The result showed that low-span subjects were more affected than were high-span subjects by whether the word to be remembered was the focus word. The effect of sentence length was not confirmed. These findings suggest that the low-span subjects had deficits in their ability to establish and/or inhibit mental focus when faced with conflict situations in reading.     

Effectiveness of Child-Directed Interaction Training for Young Japanese Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

This study examined the efficacy of Child-Directed Interaction Training (CDIT), the first phase of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), for Japanese children with autism spectrum disorders. The participants were 21 mother-child dyads with children aged 4–7 years; participants were assigned to an Immediate Treatment (IT) group or to a Waitlist (WL) control group. Across eight training sessions, mothers learned positive attention skills that were adapted from traditional PCIT training. Results showed CDIT not only improved social cognition skills and decreased disruptive behavior in Japanese children, but also reduced stress/distress among their mothers, particularly in relation to their own parenting skills and their child’s problem behaviors.     

Shades of emotion: What the addition of sunglasses or masks to faces reveals about the development of facial expression processing

Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed better classification of expressions of faces wearing sunglasses than children who saw the same faces un-occluded. When the mouth area was occluded with a mask, children under nine years showed no impairment in expression classification, relative to un-occluded faces. An early selective focus of attention on the eyes may be optimal for socialization, but mediate against accurate expression classification. The data support a model in which a threshold level of attentional control must be reached before children can develop adult-like configural processing skills and be flexible in their use of face- processing strategies.     

Seven-month-old infants chunk items in memory

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose working memory capacity is still maturing, also can chunk items in memory. In Experiment 1, we found that in the absence of chunking cues, infants failed to remember three identical hidden objects. In Experiments 2 and 3, we found that infants successfully remembered three hidden objects when provided with overlapping spatial and featural chunking cues. In Experiment 4, we found that infants did not chunk when provided with either spatial or featural chunking cues alone. Finally, in Experiment 5, we found that infants also failed to chunk when spatial and featural cues specified different chunks (i.e., were pitted against each other). Taken together, these results suggest that chunking is available before working memory capacity has matured but still may undergo important development over the first year of life.