Masataka Nakayama

Kyoto University | Kyodai · Kokoro Research Center

Psychological research on awe has largely focused on its positive dimensions, both in terms of the experiential state of awe and individual trait-based predispositions to awe experience. Little is known, however, about awe's negative-valence dimensions, such as individual tendencies to experience awe as threatening. To gain a broader understanding...

Awe is theorized as an emotion appraised by perceived vastness and need for accommodation. This theoretical framework was developed with a review of spatially and temporally distributed literature mostly in the American and European cultural context, and is assumed to be culturally universal. However, awe as described by Japanese literature, was no...

People feel a wide range of emotions. In many psychological traditions, emotions are defined as primarily emerging from within the individual, even if influenced by external factors (e.g., approval from other people). This definition is consistent with an independent self-construal. However, in some contexts, emotions are understood to have more in...

Japan's remuneration systems are moving away from seniority‐based pay towards individual performance‐based pay. We tested how the latter system works within the Japanese cultural context and whether the operation and functioning of the system reflects general psychological tendencies found in Japan. Japanese (Study 1 n = 197; Study 2 n = 235) and E...

Text-based online counseling services are rapidly spreading, especially among younger generations. However, previous research on text-based online counseling is limited to young users in Western countries. Given its potential utility for broader populations, description of the public image of the service is necessary to reach broader populations. T...

As communication tools have shifted to Social Networking Services (SNS) in recent years, especially among the younger generation, the use of text-based online counseling services is spreading rapidly in Japan. With this shift, SNS counseling is now mainly provided by temporarily trained paraprofessionals and non-professionals under the supervision...

Although well-being is helpful in measuring the state of society from various perspectives, past research has been limited to (1) questionnaire surveys, which make it difficult to target a large number of people, and (2) the major indices focus on individual factors and do not incorporate group factors. To tackle these issues, we collected daily re...

Amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, telework (remote work) has become a widespread practice adopted by companies worldwide. However, Japan has notably maintained a low rate of telework implementation, suggesting cultural factors hindering its adoption. This study aimed to elucidate the antecedents and consequences of teleworking in Japan. Leveragi...

Studies of person-organization fit (P-O fit) have shown that a fit between the values of the individual and the values of the organization leads to higher job satisfaction. Here, we extended past research by investigating P-O fit on employees’ well-being. We tested what characteristics of the person and the organization contributed to an effective...

Well-being has drawn considerable attention due to its contributions to physical and mental health, economic prosperity, and work performance. Although numerous studies have examined individual well-being, little attention has been paid to the relationship between individuals and their social groups. Based on the social psychology theory of shared...

Historical collective threat has been highlighted as a key factor behind the evolution of cultural differences, but little research has investigated how culture-threat links are reflected in concrete psychological and behavioural tendencies. Additionally, although it is well established that behavioural regulation strategies generally differ betwee...

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world have been introducing telework. However, Japan stands out for its low rate of telework implementation, and it seems there may be cultural factors that have hindered telework use in Japan during the pandemic. In this study, we aim to clarify the antecedents and consequences of te...

Text-based online counseling services are rapidly spreading, especially among younger generations. However, previous research on text-based online counseling is limited to young users in Western countries. Given its potential utility for broader populations, description of the public image of the service is necessary to reach broader populations. T...

People feel a wide range of emotions. In many psychological traditions, emotions are defined as primarily emerging from within the individual, even if influenced by external factors (e.g., approval from other people). This definition is consistent with an independent self-construal. However, in some contexts, emotions are understood to have more in...

Creating a meaning system is fundamental to human adaptation. This article reviews how the emotion of awe, characterized with perceived vastness and the need for accommodation, plays a crucial role in meaning making. Empirical evidence suggests that the experience of awe alters how people construe the world, the self, and the relationship between t...

Chat-based counselling has become increasingly popular in the era of telecommunication. The need for accessible therapy has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its text-based nature, chat-based counselling provides an opportunity for machine-based analysis. It even has the potential to provide machine-based counselling services. Howeve...

Chat-based counselling has become increasingly popular in the era of telecommunication. The need for accessible therapy has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its text-based nature, chat-based counselling provides an opportunity for machine-based analysis. It even has the potential to provide machine-based counselling services. Howeve...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively...

Causal attributions help us explain behavior but vary according to cultural context. As Japan’s remuneration systems move away from seniority-based- towards individual performance-based-pay we wanted to test whether such changes would influence attributing contribution and reward in the workplace (remuneration psychology and behavior). After readin...

How do people react to collective threats such as natural disasters or the COVID-19 pandemic? Magnificent catastrophic events might have an impact on emotions of not only those who experienced direct harm from it but also those who feel threat without actual harm. The current study demonstrated that such threat enhances self-transcendent values tha...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by triggering social support intentions. Initial experimental studie...

This study focused on two similar but potentially distinctive emotions, awe and being moved. Although these emotions have been studied independently, they have commonalities both in cognition and emotion. For example, both have been shown to influence cognitive frameworks (Tokaji, 2004), such as need for accommodation (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). In ad...

Background The wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making are important tools for integrating information between individuals, which can exceed the capacity of individual judgments. They are based on different forms of information integration. The wisdom of crowds refers to the aggregation of many independent judgments without deliberation and...

Creating a meaning system is fundamental to human adaptation. This article reviews how the emotion of awe, characterized by perceived vastness and the need for accommodation, has a crucial role in meaning-making.Empirical evidence suggests that the experience of awe alters how people construe the world, theself, and the relationship between them, a...

Evidence supporting the idea that serial-order verbal working memory is underpinned by long-term knowledge has accumulated over more than half a century. Recent studies using natural-language statistics, artificial statistical-learning techniques, and the Hebb repetition paradigm have revealed multiple types of long-term knowledge underlying serial...

Creating a meaning system is fundamental to human adaptation. This article reviews how the emotion of awe, characterized with perceived vastness and the need for accommodation, plays a crucial role in meaning making. Empirical evidence suggests that the experience of awe alters how people construe the world, the self, and the relationship between t...

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and mainly human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue that binds individuals together and triggers social support intentions. Initi...

This is an English translation of the following article that is originally written in Japanese. 中山真孝. (2020). Awe と意味生成. 心理学評論, 63(1), 28-43. https://doi.org/10.24602/sjpr.63.1_28 The translation was done by DeepL (https://www.deepl.com/). This translated version is published for communication purpose. The author does not guarantee the quality o...

ソーシャルネットワーキングサービス（SNS）は若年層を中心にコミュニケーションのあり方を変えている。これに伴い若者層の心理相談へのアクセス可能性が高まっている。行政も SNS 相談事業をいじめ・自殺・引きこもり等への対策として推進しているが，心理カウンセラーの参画は十分でなく技法としての理論的基盤が未整備である。一方で，SNS 相談は相談記録が全て残るため事後の客観的分析が可 能という利点をもつ。このためコミュニケーション手段の変容が人々にどう影響するか，SNS 相談に必要な言語認知能力は何か，といった問いについて客観的分析が可能となり，異なる専門分野の心理学者 が共同で取り組む課題を提供する。話題提供では，SNS 相談の総括的紹介（杉原）に続いて臨床心理学的分析（畑中）とテキスト分析による...

Awe is theorized as an emotion appraised by perceived vastness and need for accommodation. This theoretical framework was developed with a review of spatially and temporally distributed literature, and is assumed to be culturally universal. However, awe as described by Japanese literature, was not explicitly included in the original theorization. W...

The current study investigated the ways long-term memory contributes to short-term serial order memory of novel verbal sequences, focusing on long-term knowledge of bi-element frequency, that is, co-occurrence frequency of two consecutive elements in a linguistic environment. Participants performed two types of immediate serial recall of nine-eleme...

The Hebb repetition paradigm has recently attracted attention as a measure of serial order learning, which underlies word-form learning abilities. Although children are good vocabulary learners, it is surprising that previous Hebb learning studies with young children show rather weak Hebb effects. In this study, we conducted two experiments to iden...

Cultural psychology investigates the mutual construction of culture and the mind, in which culture creates the mind and the mind creates culture. With the goal of opening a dialogue between memory researchers and cultural psychologists, this chapter argues that cultural psychology is a type of memory research that investigates how culturally acquir...

This study investigated the personality of employees on medical leave due to mental health disorders. Focusing on Contingencies of self-worth (CSW) as a metric of personality, we examined whether the CSW of employees on medical leave due to mental health disorders matched the perceived values of their workplace, in comparison with that of employees...

Position-element association has been extensively investigated as a mechanism for serial order memory and has been widely implemented in models of short-term memory. This study examined whether and how the position-element association is learned as a form of long-term knowledge dissociated from other forms of knowledge such as sequence knowledge ac...

The present study investigated principles of phonological planning, a common serial ordering mechanism for speech production and phonological short-term memory. Nakayama and Saito (2014) have investigated the principles by using a speech-error induction technique, in which participants were exposed to an auditory distractor word immediately before...

Processing fluency influences judgment as metacognitive cue. Laham, Koval, & Alter (2012) demonstrated name-pronunciation effect whereby easy-to-pronounce (i.e., easy-to-process) names were judged more positively. In their study, however, the “pronouncability” was not defined by objective criteria, which may cast doubt on the internal validity of t...

Serial ordering mechanisms have been investigated extensively in psychology and psycholinguistics. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly that long-term phonological knowledge contributes to serial ordering. However, the mechanisms that contribute to serial ordering have yet to be fully understood. To understand these mechanisms, we demonstrate 2...

An essential function of language processing is serial order control. Computational models of serial ordering and empirical data suggest that plan representations for ordered output of sound are governed by principles related to similarity. Among these principles, the temporal distance and edge principles at a within-word level have not been empiri...