An examination of crossover and spillover effects of spousal and expatriate cross-cultural adjustment on expatriate outcomes

Integrating work-family and cross-cultural adjustment literatures, the researchers proposed and tested a spillover and crossover model of expatriates' cross-cultural adjustment with reciprocal relationships. Spillover effects refer to the influence that expatriate attitudes in a particular domain (e.g., work) have on attitudes in other domains (e.g., nonwork), whereas crossover effects refer to the influence of expatriate attitudes on the spouse's attitudes (and vice versa). Data collected from Japanese expatriates, their spouses, and their superiors strongly supported both spillover and crossover effects between expatriate and spousal cross-cultural adjustment. In addition, expatriates' cross-cultural adjustment was found to be related to satisfaction, which, in turn, was found to be negatively related to expatriates' intention to return to their homeland early.     

Respecting autonomy in difficult medical settings: a questionnaire study in Japan

Some people in Japan are still comfortable with the paternalistic role of doctors, but others wish that their own decisions would receive a greater amount of respect. A total of 747 students of universities and colleges and 114 parents of these students participated in a questionnaire survey. Most of the participants thought that autonomy should be respected in situations involving death with dignity and euthanasia, whereas it should not be respected in attempted suicide and involuntary admission of individuals with mental illness. A cluster analysis revealed that the participants could be divided into the following groups: aid in dying advocates (n=577), complete libertarians (n=109), protectors of the mentally ill (n=90), complete paternalists (n=29), and questionables (n=27). The assertion of independence score of the Scale for Independent and Interdependent Construal of the Self showed a significant difference among the 5 clusters. These findings suggest that the traditional paternalistic relationship between doctor and patient is undergoing a gradual transformation in Japan.     

The Effect of Interpersonal Touch During Childhood on Adult Attachment and Depression: A Neglected Area of Family and Developmental Psychology?

Interpersonal touch has been little studied empirically as an indicator of parent- and peer-child intimacy. Undergraduate students (n = 390) were studied using a questionnaire survey regarding the frequencies of interpersonal touch by father, mother, same-sex peers, and opposite-sex peers during preschool ages, grades 1–3, grades 4–6, and grades 7–9, as well as their current attachment style to a romantic partner and current depression. A path model indicated that current depression was influenced significantly by poorer self- and other-images as well as by fewer parental interpersonal touches throughout childhood. Other-image was influenced by early (up to grade 3) parental interpersonal touch. Our findings suggest that a lower frequency of parental touching during childhood influences the development of depression and contributes to a poorer image of an individual’s romantic partner during later adolescence and early adulthood.     

The Dream Property Scale: an exploratory English version.

Our goal is to develop an English version of the Dream Property Scale (DPS-E) based on the original normed scale in Japan (DPS-J). Factor analyses extracted four factors (Emotionality, Rationality, Activity, and Impression) and its factor structure was apparently similar to the DPS-J. The DPS-E was also shown to be related to EEG power spectral values. These results indicate that the DPS-E may provide an exploratory basis for a reliable and valid tool for capturing and quantifying the properties of dream experiences that could reflect physiological activities without the intervention of experimenters. We suggest that the DPS-E will develop into a useful tool to help clarify dream production mechanisms by further investigation.