Shyness Clinic: A Social Development Program for Adolescents and Young Adults

Shyness clinic groups were offered in a university counseling center for adolescents and young adults experiencing discomfort and difficulties in interpersonal relationships. Thirty-four students went through a preassessment and screening procedure. Twenty-three participated fully in the program. The first part of the program focused on anxiety management; the second on assertiveness in social relationships; and the third on development of conversational skills. According to results on preprogram and postprogram self-report inventories, written feedback from participants, and observations of the group leaders, participants improved in social skills and ability to manage anxiety.     

Fukuzawa Yukichi and religion

When the Meiji government allowed Christianity to be proclaimed in Japan in 1873, there aroused heated controversy about how to deal with religion including Christianity. Fukuzawa Yukichi, the most influential thinker and opinion‐leader among Japanese intellectuals in those days, participated in the controversy and wrote more than 80 articles concerning religion. At first, he took a critical standpoint against Christianity from the Utilitarian viewpoint. Then he changed his viewpoint of religion and came to admit a Unitarian Christianity for a little while. But he gradually came to be familiar with Pure Land Buddhism and developed his original phibsophy of religion in his later years.

In this article I trace the process of change in Fukuzawa's religious viewpoint and clarify his philosophy of religion in his later years, by examining his writings in chronological order.     

The roles of delay and probability discounting in texting while driving: Toward the development of a translational scientific program

A sample of 109 college students completed a survey to assess how frequently they send or read text messages while driving. In a novel discounting task with a hypothetical scenario in which participants receive a text message while driving, they rated the likelihood of replying to a text message immediately versus waiting to reply until arriving at a destination. The scenario presented several delays to a destination and probabilities of a motor vehicle crash. The likelihood of waiting to reply decreased as a function of both the delay until the destination and the probability of a motor vehicle crash. Self‐reported higher frequencies of texting while driving were associated with greater rates of both delay and probability discounting. The degree of delay discounting was altered as a function of the probability of a motor vehicle crash and vice versa. These results suggest that both delay and probability discounting are important underlying mechanisms of drivers' decision to text while driving.     

The effect of respondents' nationality and familiarity with a product category on the importance of product attributes in consumer choice: Globalization and the evaluation of domestic and foreign products

This study compared the perceptions of 376 Japanese and 191 Canadian consumers concerning the importance of different product attributes for categories of products at various stages of globalization. There was less multivariate statistical difference between the two countries for those products at a more advanced stage of globalization (consumer electronics and clothing vs. food). The joint effects of the degree of familiarity with the category of product and the country of the respondent on the importance of the product attributes were tested. The effect of familiarity was found to result in a significant statistical multivariate difference for the clothing category only. The observed statistical power of the effect of country of respondent confirmed that more statistical difference was apparent for the least globalized product. No multivariate significant statistical interaction was found between familiarity and country of respondent. Using a multi-attribute model, the evaluation of the three categories of product was computed for seven different countries of manufacture. Comparison of the total scores of each country for each product category for the Japanese and the Canadian samples confirmed that the most globalized product showed least difference in its evaluation between countries of manufacture. A well-known strong bias toward domestic products was, however, observed in both samples.     

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.     

On the relations among regular, equal unique variances, and image factor analysis models

We investigate under what conditions the matrix of factor loadings from the factor analysis model with equal unique variances will give a good approximation to the matrix of factor loadings from the regular factor analysis model. We show that the two models will give similar matrices of factor loadings if Schneeweiss' condition, that the difference between the largest and the smallest value of unique variances is small relative to the sizes of the column sums of squared factor loadings, holds. Furthermore, we generalize our results and discus the conditions under which the matrix of factor loadings from the regular factor analysis model will be well approximated by the matrix of factor loadings from Jöreskog's image factor analysis model. Especially, we discuss Guttman's condition (i.e., the number of variables increases without limit) for the two models to agree, in relation with the condition we have shown, and conclude that Schneeweiss' condition is a generalization of Guttman's condition. Some implications for practice are discussed.Kentaro Hayashi is a visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA 17837, and Peter M. Bentler is Professor, Departments of Psychology and Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles CA 90095-1563. (Emails: Khayashi@bucknell.edu, bentler@ucla.edu) Parts of this paper were discussed in a session on Factor Analysis (J. ten Berge, Chair) at the IFCS-98 International Conference, Rome, July, 1998. This work was supported by National Institute on Drug Abuse grant DA 01070. The authors thank Professors Hans Schneeweiss and Ke-Hai Yuan, and four anonymous referees, for their invaluable comments which led to an improved version of this paper.     

Male mice: Social dominance influenced by strange male odors

Male mice (N = 34) were individually raised with a castrated male cagemate from 5 to 15 weeks of age. Half of them were subsequently isolated in clean cages for 2 weeks, while the other half were housed in isolation for 2 weeks in cages that had previously housed a strange male. After 14 days of isolation-housing, one subject from each condition was placed into pairs and observed for 30 min in a neutral arena. On the next day, weights of their preputial glands were measured. Males exposed to strange male odors were more likely to be dominant during the 30-min test and to have heavier preputial glands than were males that had been housed in clean cages.     

Which is More Relevant for Perceived Happiness,Individual-Level or Area-Level Social Capital? A Multilevel Mediation Analysis

A growing number of studies have addressed how social capital is closely related to an individual’s perceived happiness. However, most happiness studies have focused on individual-level social capital, which is based on an individual’s subjective assessment of social capital gathered from social surveys. Considering that social capital was originally a collective concept, this study distinguished individual- and area-level aspects of social capital and their relationships in terms of their associations with perceived happiness. To this end, we employed multilevel mediation analysis using cross-sectional microdata from a nationwide Internet survey conducted in Japan (N = 9523). We focused on four types of social capital: trust in neighbors, contacts with neighbors, bonding, and bridging. Based on the estimation results, we first confirmed that social capital at both the individual and area levels had a positive association with perceived happiness when using them separately as an independent variable. Second, we found that a substantial portion of the effect of area-level social capital on perceived happiness was mediated by individual-level social capital. This suggests that an individual’s commitment to area-level social capital is required if a large portion of its potential benefits on perceived happiness are to materialize. Furthermore, we observed that the effects of area-level bonding and bridging on their individual-level measures were affected by several individual-level attributes, including personality traits. Overall, the results underscore the need for further investigation into the association between perceived happiness and social capital at different levels.     

Children's Understanding of Lies in Elementary School Years

The author examined whether children's understanding of lies exhibits developmental trends in the elementary school years. Four story contexts were presented to 51 first-grade students, 44 fourth-grade students, and 58 adults. These stories represented combinations of a protagonist's intention (truthful or deceptive) and the truth of the protagonist's message (true or false). The results showed that adults judged whether these messages were lies by considering the protagonist's intentions. By contrast, approximately 30% of first-grade students and some fourth-grade students did not consider intentions in making judgments, although they appropriately predicted the outcomes of the messages. These results suggest that children in the early elementary school years have a conception of lies different from that of adults, and their conception of lies becomes more sophisticated after middle childhood.