Shinya Kubota’s research while affiliated with University of Occupational and Environmental Health Japan and other places

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Publications (16)


Development of a Work Improvement Checklist for Occupational Mental Health Focused on Requests from Workers
  • Article

June 2009

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40 Reads

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13 Citations

Journal of Occupational Health

Hiroyuki Tahara

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Tatsuji Yamada

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Keiko Nagafuchi

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[...]

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Shoji Nagata

To develop tools offering definite orientation for managers and employees to support their work improvement through occupational mental health. This research was a part of the Mental Health Improvement & Reinforcement Study (MIR study), conducted from October 2004 to March 2006. We developed a trial version named the Kaizen Check List (KCL) by referring to problem solving methods for quality management. Then we improved it for a formal version named MIR Research of Recognition (MIRROR). A feedback form named MIR Action Guidance (MIRAGe) was also developed. We analyzed data from 1,953 respondents at five manufacturing enterprises in Japan using MIRROR and the Brief Job Stress Questionnaire (BJSQ) to determine whether or not the workers requesting work improvement had more stress than other workers. The KCL had 47 items, which indicated desirable working conditions for mental health at work, and four answer categories. MIRROR has 45 selected items and improved answer categories. MIRAGe displays the results of MIRROR and step-by-step guidance for work improvement. Respondents with request had significantly higher scores in stressor and lower scores in buffer factors compared with respondents without request in many items of MIRROR. A combinational use of MIRROR and stress scales is useful for finding worksites with high risk factors for mental health and for directing focus on work improvement at these worksites according to workers' requests.


Present conditions and problems of applying autogenic training to promote mental health in the workplace

April 2006

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111 Reads

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5 Citations

International Congress Series

Mental health of workers in Japan has become one of the most serious health problems in the workplace. To tackle this problem, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare set guidelines for promoting mental health of workers in 2000, in which every worker was recommended to learn autogenic training (AT) from the standpoint of “self-care”. Before the guidelines, however, some healthcare professionals had already advocated that AT should be utilized as a relaxation method to help workers cope with stress. Although knowledge about AT has spread among occupational healthcare staffs since then, there are only a small number of companies whose employees regularly practice AT. In order to overcome difficulties, we need to solve problems such as how to motivate workers without any health problems to learn AT, and how to effectively teach them the AT. In this report, we explain our activities to find solutions to these problems, which include studying what conditions are characteristic of companies whose employees have kept practicing AT, and developing a new method of teaching AT by correspondence.


Applying a Solution-Focused Approach to Support a Worker Who Is under Stress

July 2005

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36 Reads

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2 Citations

Journal of UOEH

The solution-focused approach (SFA) developed by Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer at the Brief Family Therapy Center, Milwaukee, USA is classified as brief psychotherapy. We believe that SFA can give an occupational healthcare staff useful tools that will positively influence their relationships with workers, because it focuses on workers' strengths rather than their weaknesses when the staff interviews them using SFA. In this report, we explain the case of a worker who was under stress and was interviewed using SFA. Although the worker came to the interview because of his physical symptoms, he disclosed that he was under considerable stress at work and that his main concern was his relationship with his superior. One of the authors interviewed him using SFA. In the interview the worker discovered his own resources and strengths, and finally defined his goal. In the end, he discovered solutions by himself, and has been doing well in follow-up. We describe this process in detail, and discuss potential applications of SFA in occupational medicine.


Relationship between Self-Esteem and Assertiveness Training among Japanese Hospital Nurses
  • Article
  • Full-text available

August 2004

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3,441 Reads

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62 Citations

Journal of Occupational Health

Download

A Study of the Effects of Active Listening on Listening Attitudes of Middle Managers

February 2004

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1,322 Reads

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65 Citations

Journal of Occupational Health

The present study was conducted to clarify the direct effects of active listening (AL) training given to middle managers in a local government. Altogether, 345 middle managers participated in 13 AL training sessions over two years. We developed the Inventive Experiential Learning (IEL) method, and used it as the central training method in this study. To investigate how well the participants learned AL, we asked the middle managers to answer a shorter version of the Active Listening Attitude Scale (ALAS) consisting of two subscales-i.e. "Listening Attitude" and "Listening Skill"-before training, one month after and three months after training. Altogether, 284 middle managers answered the questionnaire three times. The scores of each subscale were analyzed by repeated measurement analysis of variance. The participants were divided into three groups using the percentile values of the original sample of ALAS, i.e. low-score group (-24%), medium-score group (25-75%) and high-score group (76%-), and the proportionate changes were examined. The results showed both the "Listening Attitude" and "Listening Skill" subscales increased significantly after training. Analysis of the percentiles showed that the proportion of the low-score group decreased and that of the high-score group increased in both subscales, from one to three months after training. These changes are considered to indicate that the participants have learned AL although they attended AL training for only one day.


Relationships among Self-Management Skills, Communication with Superiors, and Mental Health of Employees in a Japanese Worksite

November 2003

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429 Reads

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6 Citations

Industrial Health

The present study investigated relationships among self-management skills, communication with superiors, and the mental health of employees in a Japanese worksite. The subjects were manufacturing workers in a medium-sized company in Kyushu. In 1999, we mailed a self-administrated questionnaire which included questions on age, gender, job rank, communication with superiors, a General Self-Efficacy Scale, a Self-Management Skill Scale, and the Japanese version of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12). Eighty percent of the subjects returned the questionnaire. Excluding senior managers and insufficient answers, the final response rate was fifty-five percent. The multiple regression analysis showed that job rank contributed significantly and positively and that age, communication with superiors, and self-management skills contributed significantly and negatively to the GHQ-12. Our results implied that self-management skills might have the potential of affecting the mental health of Japanese employees.


Relationships Among Self-Efficacy, Communication, Self-Management Skills and Mental Health of Employees at a Japanese Workplace

October 2003

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257 Reads

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6 Citations

Journal of UOEH

We investigated relationships among self-efficacy, self-management skills, communication with superiors and mental health of employees at a Japanese workplace. The subjects were 426 employees in a medium-sized manufacturing company in Kyushu. In 1999, with agreement of the company, we mailed a self-administrated questionnaire which included questions on age, gender, job rank, communication with superiors, a General Self-Efficacy Scale(GSES), a Self-Management Skill scale(SMS) and the Japanese version of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire(GHQ-12). Eighty percent of the subjects returned the questionnaire. Excluding senior managers and insufficient answers, the final response rate was 55 percent. By multiple regression analysis, we found that job rank contributed significantly and positively, and that age, communication with superiors and self-management skills contributed significantly and negatively to the GHQ-12. Our results implied that age, job rank, communication with superiors and self-management skills would contribute to the mental health of Japanese employees.


Fig.1. The Schedules of the Assertiveness Training. 
Table 2 . The changes in EE, DP and PA after the AsT 
Relationship between Burnout and Communication Skill Training among Japanese Hospital Nurses: A Pilot Study

June 2003

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964 Reads

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118 Citations

Journal of Occupational Health

We investigated the relationship between burnout and communication skill training among Japanese hospital nurses to improve the mental health of human service workers. The subjects were forty-five registered nurses referred to a self-expression skill intervention program by their section superiors, with each superior choosing from two to five nurses. The hospital was located in the Kyushu area and staffed by about four hundred nurses. The subjects were divided into an intervention group (19 nurses) and a reference group (26 nurses). The intervention group received the communication skill training in July and August, 2001. The communication skill training was carried out in accordance with the assertiveness training (AsT) precepts of Anne Dickson. In June, 2001, we delivered a set of questionnaires including age, gender, working years, a burnout scale, and a communication skill check-list as a baseline survey. The baseline questionnaires were returned at the end of June, 2001. In January, 2002, we delivered the same questionnaire again to the two groups and collected them at the end of the month. Excluding the only male and insufficient answers, twenty-six nurses (58%) returned complete answers in the initial and subsequent surveys. We found that the personal accomplishment and the two communication skills such as "accepting valid criticisms" and "negotiation" of the intervention group had improved significantly five months after the training as compared with that of the reference. Our results implied that communication skill training might have a favorable effect on burnout among Japanese hospital nurses.


Table 2 ) . 
Development of the Japanese Version of the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule

March 2003

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235 Reads

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11 Citations

Journal of UOEH

The present study investigated the reliability and validity of the Japanese version of the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule (RAS) preparatory to study the relationship between self-expression skills and mental health status of employees at a Japanese worksite. Assertiveness is one of self-expression skills and defined as standing up for one's own rights as well as for others. RAS that the most widely used was developed by Rathus in the U.S.A. and consists of 30 items. We developed the Japanese version of RAS (J-RAS) along with a back-translation. The subjects were 173 participants of a 2-day assertiveness training course from July to December, 2001 and 364 workers in a manufacturing company in the Kyushu area. We sent then J-RAS to the 173 participants before they commenced the course, and of them 170 participants returned sufficient answers for analysis. During the course their trainers completed the objective evaluations on assertive self-expression. We compared their answers with the trainers' evaluations by the Pearson's correlation to certify the J-RAS's validity. We also mailed the J-RAS to the manufacturing workers in June, 2001. Of them, 266 workers returned sufficient answers by the end of the month. We calculated the Cronbach's alpha coefficient by them to certify the internal consistency reliability of the J-RAS. In August, 2001, we mailed the J-RAS again to 98 workers who agreed to retake the test. We studied the Pearson's correlation between the initial answers and the following ones to certify the test-retest reliability of the J-RAS, using the 98 answers of the workers who agreed to be retested. Our results found that 19 item sets, excluding Q3-7, 9, 13, 19, 20, 25, 28, had significantly positive correlation with the objective evaluations. The sum of the 19 items of the J-RAS (19-item J-RAS) had significantly higher correlations with the objective evaluation than that of 30 items of the J-RAS (30-item J-RAS). The internal consistency reliability of the 19-item or 30-item J-RAS was high, because their Cronbach's alpha coefficient was more than 0.80. Their test-retest reliability was also high, because the Pearson's correlation coefficient between the initial test and the subsequent test was more than 0.84 (ps<0.001). Our results implied that the validity and reliability of the J-RAS was could be considered as acceptable and that the 19-item J-RAS measured the assertiveness of Japanese people more exactly than the 30-item J-RAS.


[Listener education]

April 2001

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19 Reads

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2 Citations

Sangyo eiseigaku zasshi Journal of occupational health

Listener education has usually been conducted as primary prevention in occupational medicine. We report on the present state of listener education in which the training focuses on active listening (AL). AL means the way of listening to a person in the person-centered attitude (PCA) that is based on Rogers' three conditions, i.e. empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence. Although the need of this kind of training has been widely described, there is a paucity of academic literature on this subject. This review deals with listener education by dividing it into two types; one is listener education in a narrow sense that consistently depends on the three conditions, and the other is listener education in a broad sense that combines other methods that have different orientations from Rogers' theory. As an example of the former, Ikemi et al. reported the importance of the PCA, and studies conducted by Kubota et al., Mishima et al., and Miyagi dealt with the actual training. As an example of the later, Morisaki and Hamaguchi et al. illustrated their training including other methods such as transactional analysis in their studies. Finally, we point out not only that future research needs to focus on the assessment of listener education, but also that AL needs to be understood from the standpoint of developing workers' competency.


Citations (14)


... Further, job satisfaction was inversely associated with a lower GHQ-12 score, suggesting that higher job satisfaction was related to fewer self-reported mental health challenges. This has also been demonstrated by previous studies among populations such as factory workers in the south of Thailand [26], teachers in Marand, Iran [10], school teachers in Japan [11], secondary school teachers in southeast Nigeria [12], and local civil servants in Japan [27]. ...

Reference:

Sense of coherence, occupational stressors, and mental health among Japanese high school teachers in Nagasaki prefecture: a multiple regression analysis
Occupational Stress and Mental Health(Industrial Hygene and Stress)
  • Citing Article
  • February 1996

Japanese Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine

... More so, Barish, (2001) discovered that in some cases these fatalities are caused by other individuals in the workplace as opposed to inanimate working objects and conditions. Although Weiss, (1999) and Hills et al., (2013) studied "workplace condition" within the context of teaching and medicine, it is considered as an influential component in the business environment as well (Mishima, Goto, Kubota & Nagata, 2006;Cottini, Kato & Westergaard-Nielsen, 2011) ...

Present conditions and problems of applying autogenic training to promote mental health in the workplace
  • Citing Article
  • April 2006

International Congress Series

... We developed an initial item pool for our instrument from two existing scales: Jackson's verbal communication scale [24] and Mishima et al. 's Attitude of Active Listening scale [42]. Jackson's scale consisted of three sub-dimensions that were relevant to our research (we excluded the written communication dimension), including verbal communication (three items, e.g., "I express technical ideas clearly, so that every meeting participant can understand them"), giving and receiving feedback (six items, e.g., "I am mindful of other meeting participants' feelings when providing feedback"), ...

The Development of a Questionnaire to Assess the Attitude of Active Listening
  • Citing Article
  • May 2000

Journal of Occupational Health

... They either consciously or unconsciously relied upon some dimensions of emotional intelligence to accurately understand and respond appropriately to customers' verbal and nonverbal signs (Schmelz and Sojka, 2003). In another instance, it was indicated that workers sensed a better and nicer manager when he was trained in emotional intelligence (Ikemi and Kubota, 1996. p.116). ...

Humanistic Psychologyaq in Japanese Corporations: Listening and the: Small Steps of Change
  • Citing Article
  • December 1996

Journal of Humanistic Psychology

... Rautalinko and Lisper's (2004) reflective listening training, which is reflecting back in your own words what you heard and sensed, showed disappointing results, while Caspersz and Sasinska's (2015) intervention showed limited support for improving the listening of business students. In another study, active listening training produced favorable results for the 60 corporate administrators participating (Kibota, Mishima, Ikem, & Nagata, 1997). listening circles technique (i.e., use of an object to signal the time to talk) proved effective in increasing self-awareness, reducing social anxiety, and lessening extreme attitudes. ...

A Research in the Effects of Active Listening on Corporate Mental Health Training
  • Citing Article
  • October 1997

Journal of Occupational Health

... Each item was designed to capture a distinct aspect of the work environment, with reference to "Locally Adjustable Mental Health Action Checklist for a Better Workplace Environment," a 24-item checklist for work environment improvement. 10 In this study, 5 options were provided for each item with reference to the previous study 11 : "Experienced for more than a year," "Recently experienced in the past year," "Not experienced but necessary in the future," "Not experienced and not particularly necessary," and "Not applicable to my workplace." We calculated the number of "Experienced for more than a year" or "Recently experienced in the past year" responses and used the number for the statistical analyses (ranging from 0 to 24). ...

Development of a Work Improvement Checklist for Occupational Mental Health Focused on Requests from Workers
  • Citing Article
  • June 2009

Journal of Occupational Health

... However, physiological measurements have not provided a coherent picture of autogenic training outcomes (Kanji et al., 2006b). Whereas activation of the parasympathetic nervous system has been observed after autogenic training, as indexed by changes in heart rate variability (e.g., Mishima et al., 1999;Mitani et al., 2006), this is not always the case (e.g., Lim & Kim, 2014). More specific physiological effects have also been reported, though not consistently (see Stetter & Kupper, 2002). ...

Psychophysiological Correlates of Relaxation Induced by Standard Autogenic Training
  • Citing Article
  • February 1999

Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics

... Communication items examined the acquisition status of skills such as "check-backs (re-confirming)" and "call-outs (communicating in a loud voice)." Meanwhile, assertiveness was intended to measure communication ability, rather than skills, and items were created with reference to the Japanese version of the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule [12] and other related literature. "Leadership" consisted of seven items, "situation monitoring" of six items, "mutual support" of five items, "communication" of four items, and "assertiveness" of 10 items for a total of 32 items across the five areas. ...

Development of the Japanese Version of the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule

Journal of UOEH

... Stimulating workplace communication between employees enhances mental health [1][2][3], discretion [4], and the well-being [5] of employees and has been associated with a reduction in depression and anxiety [6,7]. Further, poor workplace communication has been found to increase conflict in relationships between workers [8,9], whereas effective communication between workers can foster team spirit [10]. ...

Relationships Among Self-Efficacy, Communication, Self-Management Skills and Mental Health of Employees at a Japanese Workplace

Journal of UOEH

... ,11,23,26,27 . Eklof et al. (2004) 10 y Eklof y Hagberg (2006)11 demuestran las ventajas de vehicular la comunicación sobre riesgos a través de los supervisores.Shimizu et al (2003aShimizu et al ( , 2003b ...

Relationships among Self-Management Skills, Communication with Superiors, and Mental Health of Employees in a Japanese Worksite

Industrial Health