Japanese Psychological Research最新文献

We describe a case report on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for a breast cancer survivor with chronic postsurgical pain, fear of cancer recurrence, and depression. As part of multidisciplinary therapy at the pain center, 17 sessions of ACT and two follow-up sessions were provided over approximately 6 months. Outcome measures (chronic pain and fear of cancer recurrence) and process measures (pain acceptance and valued action) were assessed. Outcome measures, including pain intensity, interference, quality of life, and fear of cancer recurrence, and ACT process measures improved after the intervention and at follow-up sessions compared to baseline. Over the treatment course, depression symptoms worsened, which necessitated a leave of absence from work for several months, during which time the patient engaged in intensive ACT. Ultimately, the patient returned to work, resumed her hobbies, and acquired a new habit of exercising, demonstrating changes to her lifestyle as well. The results support the efficacy of ACT in patients with multiple psychological and physical symptoms.

Low socioeconomic status has various adverse effects on health, which can be mitigated through the shift-and-persist (S-P) strategy. Studies have focused on how this strategy can affect health in the face of adversity. However, that children learn this strategy from positive role models, such as parents, is an unexamined precondition of the theory. This study presents one bit of supporting evidence for this precondition by examining the similarity in S-P among parent–child dyads using the actor-partner interdependence model. We also examine parent and child strategies related to depressive tendencies based on mixed results in relevant research. The results from 309 parent–child pairs indicate that shifting and persisting tendencies and depressive tendencies were similar among the parent–child pairs. Furthermore, regardless of their socioeconomic status, the parents' and children's persisting scores predicted lower levels of depressive tendencies as actor effects. Although this study does not fully support S-P theory, it provides important insights regarding similar patterns of strategic tendencies between parents and children and highlights the importance of positive role models.

When people anticipate future regret, they overestimate its strength compared to experienced regret. Two experiments investigated this impact bias of regret by manipulating regret type (anticipated/experienced) in a within-subjects design. Regret was measured using the Japanese words kokaishita (後悔した) and kuyashi (悔しい), which are both translated as “regret” in English but differ in nuance in Japanese. We compared the participants' feelings of kokaishita and kuyashi when they failed at tasks in which their decisions did or did not affect the outcome. In Experiment 1 but not Experiment 2, the participants were offered an additional reward for task success. The results suggested that (a) impact bias occurs robustly when the same person both anticipates and experiences regret; (b) kokaishita is felt in response to decision failures, while kuyashi is felt for any kind of task failure; and (c) the presence of additional rewards influences the intensity of kokaishita but not that of kuyashi or impact bias.

The ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which presents a worldwide threat to humans, has focused people's attention on health and prompted the adoption of new behaviors to decrease infection risks. Concurrently, it has become clear that vulnerability to COVID-19 depends on the underlying social system and individual attitudes toward authority. For instance, many Japanese people may note that Americans protesting the government's COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates claim freedom of choice, reflecting the dominant cultural value of individualism in U.S. society. Similarly, the cultural norm of collectivism is associated with people's acceptance of public health interventions (e.g., Lu et al., 2021, regarding mask usage). In the 2021 World Happiness Report, Sachs (2021) noted how cultural values influence health and preventive behavior.

Over the past 30 years, cultural psychologists investigating mutual relationships between culture and the mind have demonstrated culturally sanctioned aspects of the self, motivation, emotion, cognition, and so on (e.g., Cohen & Kitayama, 2019). With a growing body of evidence for cultural influences on health, the pandemic will hasten progress toward health research taking insights from a cultural psychological approach. While the 12 articles in the current special issue will not directly address the battle against COVID-19, we believe they will prove timely and suggestive for a better understanding of culture's role in health, given the focus on personal responsibility in the present period of crisis and uncertainty.

In the opening invited article, Miyamoto and Ryff (2022), two leading researchers in the field of culture and health, showed the theoretical and empirical relationships between culture and health. In “Culture and Health: Recent Developments and Future Directions,” they discussed the relationship between culture and health using publicly accessible comparable datasets from Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) and Midlife in Japan (MIDJA). They first reviewed the accumulated evidence on cultural influences on health. Next, they introduced both a micro perspective on biological factors and a macro perspective on socioeconomic inequalities and how these affect the link between culture and health. The review concluded by focusing on the changing historical context surrounding these cross-cultural investigations and the effect of growing economic inequality across cultures on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The other original papers in this issue can broadly be divided into three categories: “clinical–cultural psychology,” “cultural psychology with cross-cultural experimental datasets,” and “more global approaches using comparative cultures.” First, in the clinical area, in the article entitled “Japanese Clinical Psychologists' Consensus Beliefs about Mental Health: A Mixed-Methods Approach,” Sunohara et al. (2022