A longitudinal study of the moderating effects of social capital on the relationships between changes in human capital and ikigai among Japanese older adults

Ikigai, one of the indices of well‐being, tends to decline with age because resources relating to ikigai decline. However, there are individual differences in this decline. This study tested for maintenance of ikigai among Japanese elderly, using a longitudinal study investigating the moderating role of social capital on the effects of changes in human capital on ikigai. We conducted a panel survey targeting 1,068 people (M age = 73.01 years) in 2013, and 686 people in 2017. The variables were ikigai, changes in human capital (self‐rated financial status, physical health) and social capital (social networks, trust in others), educational level, and control variables. Multiple regression analyses revealed the interaction effects of changes in physical health and changes in social networks (strong ties, weak ties) on follow‐up ikigai. Post hoc analyses indicated that declines in physical health predicted declines in ikigai among those whose social networks (strong ties and weak ties) had declined in the 4‐year study, but these relationships were not significant among those whose social networks had increased. The results suggest that older adults can weaken the adverse effect of a decline in human capital on ikigai by maintaining or increasing social networks.     

Prosodic planning while reading aloud: On-line examination of Japanese sentences

In this paper, we discuss the process of generating prosody on-line while reading a sentence orally. We report results from two studies in which eye-voice span was measured while subjects read aloud. In study one, the average eye-voice span for simple texts was only about 2.5 characters. In study two, the eye-voice span was also about 2.5 characters even when the subjects read garden-path sentences which required reanalysis during processing. That the readers looked only a few characters ahead before reading aloud suggests that the prosody which they generate is not based on a global syntactic analysis, but instead reflects only limited, local syntactic information. The subjects, therefore, make errors and repairs when this locally determined prosody obviously contradicts the meaning of the sentence.Part of the research reported in this paper was done while the second author was an invited researcher at NTT Basic Research Labs, and the research was partially funded by grants from NSF (SBR-9357983) and NIMH (R29-MH-51655) to the second author. We thank Naotake Kanbe, Kazuhiko Kakehi, and Mary Beckman for their valuable comments.     

Modality dependency of familiarity ratings of Japanese words

Familiarity ratings for a large number of aurally and visually presented Japanese words were measured for 11 subjects, in order to investigate the modality dependency of familiarity. The correlation coefficient between auditory and visual ratings was .808, which is lower than that observed for English words, suggesting that a substantial portion of the mental lexicon is modality dependent. It was shown that the modality dependency is greater for low-familiarity words than it is for medium- or high-familiarity words. This difference between the low- and the medium- or high-familiarity words has a relationship to orthography. That is, the dependency is larger in words consisting only ofkanji, which may have multiple pronunciations and usually represent meaning, than it is in words consisting only ofhiragana or katakana, which have a single pronunciation and usually do not represent meaning. These results indicate that the idiosyncratic characteristics of Japanese orthography contribute to the modality dependency.     

Sequential effects in face-attractiveness judgment

A number of studies have shown that current-trial responses are biased toward the response of the preceding trial in perceptual decisionmaking tasks (the sequential effect-Holland and Lockhead, 1968 Perception & Psychophysics 3 409-414). The sequential effect has been widely observed in evaluation of the physical properties of stimuli as well as more complex properties. However, it is unclear whether subjective decisions (e.g., attractiveness judgments) are also susceptible to the sequential effect. Here, we examined whether the sequential effect would occur in face-attractiveness judgments. Forty-eight pictures of male and female faces were presented successively. Participants rated the attractiveness of each face on a 7-point scale. The results showed that the attractiveness rating of a given face assimilated toward the rating of the preceding trial. In a separate experiment, we provided the average attractiveness rating by others for each trial as feedback. The feedback weakened the sequential effect. These findings suggest that attractiveness judgment is also biased toward the preceding judgment, and hence the sequential effect can be extended into the domain of subjective decisionmaking.     

benefits of job clubs for executive job seekers: a tale of hares and tortoises

This qualitative research study compares the experiences of 2 groups of executive job seekers—job club members and nonmembers—through thematic analysis of open‐ended interviews. The findings indicated that job club members benefited from group learning, increased accountability, networking opportunities, emotional support, helping other members, and enhanced understanding of the context of their experiences. Job club members also enjoyed lower levels of frustration with the search process, used a wider range of outplacement firm services, and devoted more time on average to job search activities. Suggestions for practical implementation and application of results are discussed.     

Threading dislocation with b=c+2a in 4H-SiC as determined by LACBED

The Burgers vectors of the so-called threading screw dislocations (a total of 28 dislocations) in 4H-SiC were determined by large-angle convergent-beam electron diffraction. A new type of TSD, that is, b = c + 2a dislocation, was identified. Thus, all of the four types of TSD predicted by Onda et al. [Phil. Mag. Lett. 93 (2013) p.591] were identified.     

Influence of gender membership on sequential decisions of face attractiveness

Responses in a current trial are biased by the stimulus and response in the preceding trial. In a mixed-category sequence, the sequential dependency is weaker when the stimuli of the current and preceding trials fall under different categories. In the present study, we investigated the influence of the gender membership of faces on the sequential dependency. Forty-eight pictures of male and female faces were presented successively. Participants rated the attractiveness, roundness, or intelligence of each face on a 7-point scale. The sequential effect was robustly observed, irrespective of the property to be judged. However, between-gender sequential dependency was weaker than within-gender dependency only in the attractiveness judgment. These findings suggest that the gender of faces serves as a cue for forming category representations when face attractiveness is of interest, and hence that the formation of categories in sequential decisions is an adaptive process that depends on the property to be judged.     

Effects and Limitations of Prosodic and Semantic Biases on Syntactic Disambiguation

This paper examined the effects of prosody on the syntactic ambiguity resolution of Japanese sentences, especially with reference to the interaction with semantic bias. Syntactically ambiguous sentences with different types of semantic bias were constructed. The degree of bias in each sentence was evaluated through visual presentation experiments. Three types of sentences were selected based on the results of visual presentation experiments, were recorded with prosody maximally favoring each possible interpretation of the sentences, and were used as the stimuli for the auditory presentation experiments. The results showed that prosodic cues can influence the interpretation of a sentence even when the sentence is strongly semantically biased. The results also showed a limitation to prosodic cues. The prosodic biases alone were not sufficient to fully determine the interpretation of the sentences even when the sentences were neutrally biased semantically.