Shin-ichiro Kumagaya’s research while affiliated with The University of Tokyo and other places

Recent studies have suggested that autistic perception can be attributed to atypical Bayesian inference; however, it remains unclear whether the atypical Bayesian inference originates in the perceptual or post-perceptual stage or both. This study examined serial dependence in orientation at the perceptual and response stages in autistic and neurotypical adult groups. Participants comprised 17 autistic and 23 neurotypical adults. They reproduced the orientation of a Gabor stimulus in every odd trial or its mirror in every even trial. In the similar-stimulus session, a right-tilted Gabor stimulus was always presented; hence, serial dependence at the perceptual stage was presumed to occur because the perceived orientation was similar throughout the session. In the similar-response session, right- and left-tilted Gabor patches were alternately presented; thus serial dependence was presumed to occur because the response orientations were similar. Significant serial dependence was observed only in neurotypical adults for the similar-stimulus session, whereas it was observed in both groups for the similar-response session. Moreover, no significant correlation was observed between serial dependence and sensory profile. These findings suggest that autistic individuals possess atypical Bayesian inference at the perceptual stage and that sensory experiences in their daily lives are not attributable only to atypical Bayesian inference.

BACKGROUND: Presenteeism-induced productivity loss is a global concern. This issue is equally serious in Japan. As a “super-aged society,” maintaining and promoting Japanese employees’ health is an urgent issue. The combination of these factors makes it imperative to identify the factors that affect presenteeism and clarify the mechanisms driving these factors in Japanese organizations. OBJECTIVE: Only a few extant studies address presenteeism as a performance variable. Presenteeism can create serious productivity losses in Japan, as it is a “super-aged society.” Hence, this study aims to clarify the relationships between humble leadership, psychological safety, and presenteeism in Japanese organizations. METHODS: We hypothesized that psychological safety mediated the effect of humble leadership on presenteeism. The data of 462 employees from 11 companies were analyzed. RESULTS: The results supported our hypothesis. Additionally, leader humility, as perceived by the followers, was positively correlated with leaders’ own psychological safety in their teams. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings contribute to the existing literature by highlighting the roles of humble leadership and psychological safety in health and productivity management while accounting for cultural influences. The practical implications of our findings and future directions are also discussed.

In the 1940s, the child welfare and mental hygiene movements merged, leading to the emergence of the category of autism, as childhood became a focus of psychiatric surveillance. This resulted in stigma placed on parents through psychoanalytic explanations attributing autism to an inappropriate upbringing. A social movement by parents emerged as a response to challenge this medical perspective, coinciding with the deinstitutionalization and community transition trend of the mid-1970s, expanding the authority of therapists rather than physicians. The redefinition of autism was made possible through collaborative efforts between parents and therapists. Against the backdrop of mid-20th-century norms in middle-class child rearing, the concept of Asperger`s syndrome spread with heightened sensitivity to minor deviations or delays. Parent groups seeking support for autistic individuals without intellectual or language impairments, and their families engaged with autism researchers, who were also parents, to influence academia, leading to conceptual expansion and geneticization. These actions provided legitimacy to parents advocating for children with language impairments within the same genetic community. The broadening of the diagnostic criteria inevitably gave rise to a group of autistic self-advocates who could assert themselves without linguistic impairments. In the early 1990s, a neurodiversity movement emerged, aiming to depathologize autism and promote inclusive societal realization, in contrast to the medical model-focused parent groups. This movement expanded in various directions and, like previous parent groups, sought to influence academia' s authority over defining “what is autism.” While many activists agree with the medical definition describing the core features of autism, some challenge the current autism concept because it is considering social communication difficulties as individual traits. Empirically grounded studies supporting these trends are also emerging. Sociology, which has studied the normativity of social communication, can potentially align with the neurodiversity movement by describing micro-level communication styles and macro-level social orders that have been customized for neurotypicals and exclude autistics.

People are often unwilling to approach something that they perceive to be contaminated. Perceived contamination is associated with disgust and can be explained using the concept of magical contagion. As disgust is associated with the morality of purity, the role of disgust in the relationship between morality and the perception of contaminated things needs to be scrutinized. This study investigated how people are motivated to avoid something that they perceive to be contaminated with the Moral Foundations Theory as its theoretical framework and prison work products as the study object. In addition to the traditionally used scale to measure one’s concerned moral foundation(s), the moral values regarding purity and religiosity in a specifically Japanese context were measured using the Purity Orientation–Pollution Avoidance Scale, which has four subscales: Mental Purity, Respect for Religion, Bodily Purity, and Pathogen Avoidance. The results reveal that contamination-related disgust mediates the relationships between the Respect for Religion subscale and avoidance toward prison work products, as well as between the Pathogen Avoidance subscale and avoidance toward prison work products. The present study was novel in that it clarifies the relationship involving morality, disgust, and avoidance. The implications of these findings tap into some topics involving cultural differences.

Organizational research has increased in the contemporary, digitalized and global society. Mainly researchers in Western countries conducted empirical, organizational research in the past. These studies have investigated combinations of psychological safety, knowledge sharing and leaders’ expression of humility because these variables have crucial roles in organizational functions. Japanese research on these variables has been scarce due to the lack of scales for assessing these variables in Japanese. From a methodological perspective, research conducted in Western and other cultures where most people understand English requires multicultural validation studies. Therefore, we developed Japanese versions of scales assessing psychological safety, knowledge sharing and expressed humility and assessed their structural validity, internal consistency and convergent validity. The results indicated factor structures and inter-correlations between the scales consistent with previous research. This work is novel because of its large samples across multiple job types in contemporary work organizations. We expect this study to make methodological and theoretical contributions to future research.

Stigma of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is a crucial factor leading to a lower quality of life for individuals with ASD. This research evaluated an intervention effect for the stigma through an experience of simulated autistic visual perception and video-based social contact. The intervention was conducted as an experiential workshop for the ASD simulator. Participants (N = 217; 156 women, 61 men; a mean age of 41.3) voluntarily attended the workshop. In the workshop, they received a short lecture on autistic perception, a simulated experience using the ASD simulator, a narrative video of individuals with ASD, and a group discussion. They completed the multidimensional attitudes scale, which was developed to measure four attitudes toward ASD: negative affect, calm, cognitions, and behaviors. The attitudes were measured three times: the period of registration with the workshop, during participation in the workshop, and six weeks after the workshop. With regard to the measure during participation in the workshop, attendees responded to the attitudes at the beginning or end of the workshop, to confirm whether attitudes changes were attributed to the effectiveness of the intervention or artifacts resulting from participation in the workshop. A significant reduction was observed in negative affective attitudes at the end of the workshop and persisted even six weeks afterward, even though not observed in calm, cognitive, and behavioral attitudes. Our findings suggest that implementation of our intervention can bring about reduction of the stigma associated with ASD. Further studies with a random sampling method are needed to validate its generalizability and elaborate the components of the intervention.