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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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April 2007 - present
April 2002 - March 2007
Publications
Publications (114)
The increasing occurrence of singlehood raises the question of whether people enjoy greater emotional wellbeing alone or in an intimate relationship. Guided by an evolutionary theoretical framework of human emotions, the current research aimed to address whether individuals are emotionally better off single than in an intimate relationship, taking...
Psychosocial acceleration theory postulates that human females have an evolved reaction norm that accelerates reproductive timing in response to childhood adversity, such as low socioeconomic status (SES). While this theory has garnered widespread acceptance in psychology, the extant evidence suggests that such a reaction norm was not adaptive in p...
It is well-known that the caudate nucleus is associated with motivational behaviors and subjective well-being. However, no longitudinal studies have examined the relationship between brain structure, behavioral orientations, and subjective well-being. This study analyzes data from our previous longitudinal study to examine whether future subjective...
People make friends for a variety of reasons. The current study aimed to explore these reasons and the role of the Dark Triad in predicting them, using self-report questionnaires in a sample drawn from 12 countries. We found that the most important reasons for making friends were having people around with desirable traits such as compatibility, who...
It is a well-known fact that the caudate nucleus is associated with motivational behaviors and subjective well-being. However, there are no longitudinal studies that have examined the relationship between brain structure, behavioral orientations, and subjective well-being. This study analyzes data from our previous longitudinal study to examine whe...
In recent years, loneliness and social isolation have become common social problems. Previous research has shown that loneliness affects the structure and function of the brain as well as function of the autonomic nervous system. Our previous study found that loneliness has a negative impact on the computation of relationship value in response to c...
A set of four vignette studies (total N = 1600) examined whether voluntariness, novelty, vulnerability and irrevocability of reconciliation events serve as conciliatory signals that communicate serious intentions for improved relations. Studies 1 and 2 manipulated the presence of the four factors in the reconciliation event initiated by the politic...
Of late, internet addiction among adolescents has become a serious problem, with increased internet use. Previous research suggests that the more people become addicted to the internet, the more they isolate themselves from society. Conversely, it has been suggested that abundant social capital (the networks of relationships among people who live a...
The current research aimed to study the strategies that people employ in order to become more desirable as mates in different cultural settings. More specifically, using a closed‐ended questionnaire on a sample of 7181 participants from 14 different countries, we identified 10 different strategies that people employ to become more appealing as mate...
This study examines the relationship between ideology and resistance to the government's apology to Asian victims of Japan's colonial rule policy, which varies according to political knowledge. Based on existing research, because only a limited percentage of voters consider politics to be ideology based, it is expected that the association between...
Previous studies have revealed that reading fiction is associated with dispositional empathy and theory-of-mind abilities. Earlier studies established a correlation between fiction reading habits and the two measures of social cognition: trait fantasy (i.e., the tendency to transpose oneself into fictitious characters) and performance on the Readin...
The current research examines cross-cultural differences in people’s daily stress experiences and the role of social orientations in explaining their experiences. Using a situation sampling method, Study 1 collected European Canadian and Japanese undergraduates’ examples of stressful interpersonal and non-interpersonal situations they experienced,...
Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood. In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries, namely Austria, Brazil, China, Greece, H...
Human social hierarchies comprise two distinct bases of status: dominance and prestige. One can acquire high social status not only by physically intimidating others (dominance) but also by providing information goods to others (prestige). Given that prestige-oriented individuals need to be liked and accepted by others, we hypothesized that they wo...
Objective
Caring, sensitive parenting is known to be associated with higher levels of engagement in support-seeking behaviors among children and young adolescents. However, no study has yet explored the role of perceived parental attention in social support seeking in early adulthood. Growing evidence suggests that the µ-opioid receptor gene polymo...
Apologies by political leaders to the citizens of a victimized country have attracted attention in recent years as a means of improving relations between nations. Existing studies have identified several elements that make such an apology effective, but from the politician's point of view, it is difficult to issue a statement containing all these e...
This study aimed at replicating a previously reported pattern: costly apologies are perceived as more sincere than non-costly apologies even when the transgression was unintentional, while costly apologies do not foster forgiveness more than non-costly apologies when the transgression was unintentional. We conducted a vignette study with a 2 (apolo...
Previous studies have suggested that human impulsivity is an adaptive response to childhood environmental harshness: individuals from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be more impulsive. However, no studies have tested the evolvability of this reaction norm. This study examined whether (a) impulsivity is associated with higher fitn...
People's daily stress experiences differ across cultures. The current study examined how people cope with daily stress by applying primary and secondary control coping and how people change their strategies across situations (actual vs. ideal situations). European Canadians (n = 100), East Asian Canadians (n = 98), and the Japanese (n = 103) read 4...
To date, there has been no systematic examination of cross-cultural differences in group-based shame, guilt and regret following wrongdoing. Using a community sample (N = 1,358), we examined people's reported experiences of shame, guilt, and regret following transgressions by themselves and by different identity groups (i.e., family, community, cou...
Prior research has found that East Asians are less willing than Westerners to seek social support in times of need. What factors account for this cultural difference? Whereas previous research has examined the mediating effect of relational concern, we predicted that empathic concern, which refers to feeling sympathy and concern for people in need...
Previous studies in population genetics have proposed that the Y-chromosomal (Y-DNA) haplogroup D ancestor likely originated from Africa. The haplogroup D branch next started Out-of-Africa migration, rapidly expanded across Eurasia, and later diversified in East Asia. Y-DNA haplogroup D-M55, one of the branches of haplogroup D, is only found in mod...
A single nucleotide polymorphism in the serotonin 2A receptor gene (HTR2A rs6311 guanine [G] vs. adenine [A]) appears associated with positive emotional contagion (social sharing of happiness) in Japanese people. However, it remains unknown whether the HTR2A polymorphism also impacts the social sharing of happiness in Western cultures. The present...
This study investigated whether aspects of early life environment (quality of parental relationship, frequency of parental violence including disciplinary violence, amount of parental attention, and family income during childhood) would affect one's subjective well-being and loneliness later in life (i.e., during young adulthood). This study also i...
The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) is associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking behaviors that have had an adaptive value in the history of human migration. It also plays a role in moderating the extent to which people adhere to cultural norms and practices. The aim of this study was to replicate previous findings about how DRD4 polymorphis...
Robust evidence supports the importance of apologies for promoting forgiveness. Yet less is known about how apologies exert their effects. Here, we focus on their potential to promote forgiveness by way of increasing perceptions of relationship value. We used a method for directly testing these causal claims by manipulating both the independent var...
The current research aimed to examine the reasons people are single, that is, not in an intimate relationship, across eight different countries-Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, and the UK. We asked a large cross-cultural sample of single participants (N = 6,822) to rate 92 different possible reasons for being single. Th...
Drawing on recent evidence suggesting that individuals having the G allele of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) polymorphism are especially susceptible to socio-cultural environmental influences, including cultural norms, the present study investigated the interplay of culture and two OXTR polymorphisms (rs53576 and rs2254298) in the domain of emotional...
This research investigated whether the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is known to code the value of various rewards, is involved in the relationship value recalibration process. Previous research suggests that people upregulate the relationship value of a specific friend in response to the friend's commitment signals. In a functional magn...
Early-life environments have been associated with various social behaviors, including trust, in late adolescence and adulthood. Given that the oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (OXTR rs53576) moderates the impact of childhood experience on social behaviors, in the present study, we examined the main effect of childhood adversity through a self-re...
The main goal of the present research is to examine socio-ecological hypothesis on apology and compensation. Specifically, we conducted four studies to test the idea that an apology is an effective means to induce reconciliation in a residentially stable community, whereas compensation is an effective means in a residentially mobile community. In S...
Prosocial behavior consists of a cost to the actor and a benefit of others. Previous studies have shown that prosocial actors generally receive positive social evaluations from observers. However, it is unknown how each component of prosocial behavior (i.e., cost and benefit) influences the two dimensions of person perception (i.e., warmth and comp...
We conducted two replication studies of Andreoni and Miller’s (2002) modified dictator game study, which revealed that participants’ altruistic decisions were consistent with the notion of utility maximization. The two studies (Study 1 with small stake sizes and Study 2 with large stake sizes) included 11 modified dictator games, in which participa...
Political apologies, which typically consist of (a) admission of injustice/wrongdoing, (b) acknowledgment of harm and/or victim suffering, (c) expression of remorse, (d) acceptance of responsibility, (e) offer of repair, and (f) forbearance, often meet opposition from the constituency of the apologizing government. This study investigated which of...
Punishment can reform uncooperative behavior and hence could have contributed to humans’ ability to live in large-scale societies. Punishment by unaffected third parties has received extensive scientific scrutiny because third parties punish transgressors in laboratory experiments on behalf of strangers that they will never interact with again. Oft...
Researchers commonly conceptualize forgiveness as a rich complex of psychological changes involving attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Psychometric work with the measures developed to capture this conceptual richness, however, often points to a simpler picture of the psychological dimensions in which forgiveness takes place. In an effort to better...
Groups, such as governments and organizations, apologize for their misconduct. In the interpersonal context, the forgiveness-fostering effect of apologies is pronounced when apologizing entails some cost (e.g., compensating damage, cancelling a favorite activity to prioritize the apology) because costly apologies tend to be perceived as more sincer...
In intergroup conflicts, offers of financial compensation may be perceived as insulting by recipient groups and could exacerbate the conflicts. However, some scholars consider that it rather enhances the positive effects of political apologies. To test the effects of offers of apology, compensation, and apology + compensation, this study investigat...
Résumé
L’aptitude innée au pardon est associée au bien-être subjectif et à des résultats positifs en matière de santé. Cependant, des chercheurs ont récemment affirmé que, dans les cultures collectivistes, le pardon dépend essentiellement de normes culturelles qui accordent de la valeur à l’harmonie sociale, et que la disposition au pardon est moin...
For baby odor analyses, noninvasive, stress-free sample collection is important. Using a simple method, we succeeded in obtaining fresh odors from the head of five newborn babies. These odors were chemically analyzed by two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC × GC-MS), and compared with each other or with the odor of a...
Three autobiographical studies tested the valuable relationships hypothesis of forgiveness. Although previous studies revealed that relationship value predicts interpersonal forgiveness, the measure of relationship value may be conflated with affective assessments of the relationship with the transgressor, which might have caused a criterion contam...
People often experience anger and/or disgust when observing wrongdoings. It is considered that anger and disgust elicited by moral violations are associated with different social functions: Anger motivates direct punishment and disgust motivates indirect punishment. However, within the domain of morality, some scholars question the distinctness of...
Dependence on a partner facilitates various types of relationship maintenance effort. In this paper, we report on two experiments in which the level of dependence was manipulated. Study 1 tested whether dependence promotes other enhancement (a form of ingratiation, whereby the likeability of the partner is positively distorted). Study 2 tested whet...
Evolutionary psychology is a discipline devoted to understanding the human mind under a unifying meta-theoretical framework—the theory of natural selection (e.g., Barkow et al. in The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press, New York, 1992; Buss in Evolutionary psychology: the new science of the...
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) has engaged the interest of social and personality psychologists as it has deep implications for the psychology of intergroup conflict, particularly regarding factors such as prejudice and discrimination, as well as international conflict resolution. Nevertheless, few studies have directly assessed how SDO relates...
Multiple regressions of War Apology, Fukushima Apology, and General Apology.
(XLSX)
Previous studies have shown that a cytosine (C) to thymine (T) single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the human cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) gene is associated with positive emotional processing. C allele carriers are more sensitive to positive emotional stimuli including happiness. The effects of several gene polymorphisms related to sensitivity...
Main effects of country, sex, and cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) genotype on the Subjective Happiness Scale score.
Results are expressed as means ± standard errors of the mean. Variables were compared using a 2 (country: Japan, Canada) × 2 (sex: male, female) × 3 (CNR1 genotype: CC, CT, TT) ANOVA followed by Bonferroni-corrected multiple comparisons...
Main effects of country, sex, and cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) genotype on situation-specific happiness.
Results are expressed as means ± standard errors of the mean. The variables were compared using a 2 (country: Japan, Canada) × 2 (sex: male, female) × 3 (CNR1 genotype: CC, CT, TT) ANOVA, followed by Bonferroni-corrected multiple comparisons. S...
Correlations between the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) scores and situation-specific happiness in Japanese participants.
The table shows Pearson’s correlation coefficients. Asterisks indicate statistically significant correlations after false discovery rate correction. For each item of the SHS, the rating score of general happiness was positivel...
Correlations between the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) scores and situation-specific happiness in Canadian participants.
The table shows Pearson’s correlation coefficients. Asterisks indicate statistically significant correlations after false discovery rate correction. For each item of the SHS, the rating score of general happiness was positivel...
Relationship value promotes conciliatory behaviors in interpersonal relationships. This study examined whether the effect of relationship value extends to international conflicts. After experimentally manipulating the relationship value of South Korea, 524 Japanese citizens were asked their attitudes about issues involving South Korea. In the first...
The present study explored why married couples periodically exchange gifts. Based on the commitment signal hypothesis, we tested whether relational mobility, which was operationalized as divorce rate in Study 1 and relational opportunities in Study 2, is positively correlated with the frequency of gift exchanges among married couples. In Study 1, w...
Reconciliation is an integral part of our social lives. Nevertheless, if a victim perceives the risk of further exploitation by his/her transgressor as non-negligible, the victim may well have difficulty forgiving the transgressor. Therefore, a key ingredient of reconciliation is the transgressor's sincere apology. Theoretical and empirical studies...
Happiness is regarded as one of the most fundamental human goals. Given recent reports that positive feelings are contagious (e.g., the presence of a happy person enhances others' happiness) because of the human ability to empathize (i.e., sharing emotions), empathic ability may be a key factor in increasing one's own subjective level of happiness....
Punishment facilitates large-scale cooperation among humans, but how punishers, who incur an extra cost of punishment, can successfully compete with non-punishers, who free-ride on the punisher’s policing, poses an evolutionary puzzle. One answer is by coordinating punishment to minimise its cost. Notice, however, that in order to effectively coord...
The present study aimed to examine how the replaceability of a loss moderates the effectiveness of compensation. In Study 1, we sampled real life experiences of experiential loss, material loss, or loss of materials to which the victims had special attachment, and assayed subsequent feelings toward the transgressor who caused the loss. The results...
Third parties intervene in others' behaviors in various ways, such as punishing a harmdoer and/or helping a victim. Moreover, third parties may reward generous altruists. As such, various types of third-party intervention strategies are conceivable. Nevertheless, researchers have disproportionately focused on third-party punishment. In the present...
Although human saliva contains the monoamine serotonin, which plays a key role in the modulation of emotional states, the association between salivary serotonin and empathic ability remains unclear. In order to elucidate the associations between salivary serotonin levels, trait empathy, and the sharing effect of emotions (i.e., sharing emotional ex...
The present study investigated the association between a polymorphism of the serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) gene and the form of impulsive choice known as delay discounting. Using a hypothetical situation, we asked Japanese participants to choose between receiving (or paying) a different amount of money immediately or with a specified delay (one w...
People use relatively low-cost signals to maintain close relationships, in which they engage in costlier exchanges of tangible support. Paying attention to a partner allows an individual to communicate his or her interest in the relationship with the partner. Previous studies have revealed that when Person A pays attention to Person B, B’s feeling...
Significance
Cross-cultural tests from 16 nations were performed to evaluate the hypothesis that the emotion of pride evolved to guide behavior to elicit valuation and respect from others. Ancestrally, enhanced evaluations would have led to increased assistance and deference from others. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potent...
People attend to their partners' pro-relationship behaviors (or commitment signals) which in turn leads to a positive adjustment in perceived strength of interpersonal bonds. This bond-confirming effect is stronger when the commitment signal entails some high cost (e.g., receiving an expensive birthday present), and by contrast, it is weaker when t...
Cooperation among strangers is a marked characteristic of human sociality. One prominent evolutionary explanation for this form of human cooperation is indirect reciprocity, whereby each individual selectively helps people with a ‘good’ reputation, but not those with a ‘bad’ reputation. Some evolutionary analyses have underscored the importance of...
Social animals develop intimate bonds with their social partners. However, bond formation entails the risk of being exploited by partners. Previous studies have shown that people monitor partner attention to themselves to assess commitment to the relationship. Accordingly, a partner’s social attention promotes the receiver’s intimacy with the partn...
Recent research on consumption and subjective well-being has revealed that experiential purchases and prosocial spending promote happiness by enhancing the purchasers’ social relationships. This study (N = 1523) explored whether undergraduate students’ consumption behaviors during summer break would be associated with their post-break happiness, an...
Reconciliation processes are influenced by two important dispositional variables: (i) the victim's disposition to forgive the offender, and (ii) the offender's disposition to apologize to the victim. We translated extant English measures of each of these dispositions into Japanese using the back-translation method. We then examined the validity of...
The watching eyes effect refers to the phenomenon that people behave more altruistically than usual when an eye-image is present in their environment. In this paper, we report two failed replications of the watching eyes effect. In both Studies 1 and 2, participants decided how many coins out of a seven coin endowment (each coin worth 100 Japanese...
Pride is considered to be an emotion related to the attainment of status. People (at least in Canada and Fiji) implicitly associate the pride expression with high status. In a series of four implicit association test (IAT) studies, we explored the implicit association between the pride expression and high status in Japan. Study 1 showed that Japane...
Human societies are characterized by large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals. One evolutionary explanation for such human ultra-sociality is the notion of “strong reciprocity,” which posits that strong reciprocators not only unconditionally cooperate but also punish non-cooperators in order to enforce cooperative norms withi...
Many experiments have demonstrated that people are willing to incur cost to punish norm violators even when they are not directly harmed by the violation. Such altruistic third-party punishment is often considered an evolutionary underpinning of large-scale human cooperation. However, some scholars argue that previously demonstrated altruistic thir...
Due to the ever-present allure of potentially more appealing or attractive partners, people in mutually committed relationships face a commitment problem (i.e., uncertainty about partner fidelity). This problem exists for both friendship and romantic relationships. In an exploratory pilot study, participants described real-life commitment-confirmin...