Asuka Komiya

Cultural grounding of regret: Regret in self and interpersonal contexts

The purpose of this study was to explore cultural similarities and differences in regret, focusing on distinctions between interpersonal and self-situations, and between action and inaction regrets. Japanese and American undergraduates were asked to describe regrets experienced in interpersonal and self-situations. We found that both situational and cultural contexts influenced the likelihood of regretting inactions over actions. Participants were more likely to recall inaction regrets in self-situations than in interpersonal situations, and that the likelihood of recalling inaction regrets was more pronounced for Americans than for Japanese. Furthermore, we examined the intensity of the regret. Whereas American students experienced regret as intense as that of Japanese students in self-situations, Japanese students experienced regret more strongly than American students in interpersonal situations. Detailed content analysis also showed that individuals experienced regret in ways consistent with cultural values. The situational and cultural grounding of regret is discussed.

Cultural Adaptation of Visual Attention: Calibration of the Oculomotor Control System in Accordance with Cultural Scenes

Previous studies have found that Westerners are more likely than East Asians to attend to central objects (i.e., analytic attention), whereas East Asians are more likely than Westerners to focus on background objects or context (i.e., holistic attention). Recently, it has been proposed that the physical environment of a given culture influences the cultural form of scene cognition, although the underlying mechanism is yet unclear. This study examined whether the physical environment influences oculomotor control. Participants saw culturally neutral stimuli (e.g., a dog in a park) as a baseline, followed by Japanese or United States scenes, and finally culturally neutral stimuli again. The results showed that participants primed with Japanese scenes were more likely to move their eyes within a broader area and they were less likely to fixate on central objects compared with the baseline, whereas there were no significant differences in the eye movements of participants primed with American scenes. These results suggest that culturally specific patterns in eye movements are partly caused by the physical environment.

Trust, Cohesion, and Cooperation After Early Versus Late Trust Violations in Two-Person Exchange: The Role of Generalized Trust in the United States and Japan

We examine how the timing of trust violations affects cooperation and solidarity, including trust and relational cohesion. Past studies that used repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas suggest that trust violations are more harmful when they occur in early rather than later interactions. We argue that this effect of early trust violations depends on cultural and individual differences in generalized trust. A laboratory study from high- and low-trust cultures (the United States vs. Japan) supported our claim. First, early trust violations were more harmful than late trust violations, but only for Americans; the pattern reversed for Japanese. Second, these patterns were mediated by individual differences in generalized trust. Finally, generalized trust also moderated the effect of trust violations in the United States but not Japan. By demonstrating that generalized trust is not only lower but also less important in low-trust cultures, our research advances our understanding of how culture affects the development of solidarity in exchange relations.

Negotiating with the future: incorporating imaginary future generations into negotiations

People to be born in the future have no direct influence on current affairs. Given the disconnect between people who are currently living and those who will inherit the planet left for them, individuals who are currently alive tend to be more oriented toward the present, posing a fundamental problem related to sustainability. In this study, we propose a new framework for reconciling the disconnect between the present and the future whereby some individuals in the current generation serve as an imaginary future generation that negotiates with individuals in the real-world present. Through a laboratory-controlled intergenerational sustainability dilemma game (ISDG), we show how the presence of negotiators for a future generation increases the benefits of future generations. More specifically, we found that when faced with members of an imaginary future generation, 60% of participants selected an option that promoted sustainability. In contrast, when the imaginary future generation was not salient, only 28% of participants chose the sustainable option.

Natural Disaster Risk and Collectivism

Previous research found that low levels of national wealth and high levels of historical pathogen prevalence are associated with collectivism. The main idea is that harsh economic and physical environments present a psychological threat, which evokes collectivism or the priority of protecting in-group members. To the extent that natural disasters pose a major threat, we hypothesized that natural disaster risk is also associated with collectivism. Consistent with our hypothesis, nations with higher levels of natural disaster risk were more collectivistic than those with lower risk using both Hofstede’s individualism–collectivism scores and Taras, Steel, and Kirkman’s meta-analytic individualism–collectivism scores from 1970 to 2010, and Taras et al.’s meta-analytic individualism–collectivism scores from the 2000s. This association remained significant when controlling for other climatic factors such as historical pathogen prevalence, climatic harshness, and distance from the equator, respectively, when Hofstede’s individualism–collectivism scores and Taras et al.’s scores from 1970 to 2010 were used. The association became marginal when Taras et al.’s scores from the 2000s were used. A multiple regression analysis showed that natural disaster risk was not a predictor of collectivism, above and beyond gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, pathogen prevalence, climatic harshness, and distance from the equator simultaneously. Finally, we found the interaction between GDP per capita and natural disaster such that the link between natural disaster risk and collectivism was present among wealthy but not among poorer nations.

The Rural–Urban Difference in Interpersonal Regret

The present research examined rural–urban differences in interpersonal regret. In Study 1, participants who grew up in rural areas reported stronger interpersonal regret than those who grew up in large cities. In Study 2, we conducted an experiment and found that participants who were assigned to imagine a rural life reported greater interpersonal regret than those who were assigned to imagine an urban life. Moreover, this rural–urban difference was mediated by the degree to which participants wrote about informal social control such as gossip and reputation concerns. Finally, in Study 3, we used the pictorial eye manipulation, which evokes a concern for informal social control, and found that participants from large cities who were exposed to the eyes reported more intense interpersonal regret than those who were not exposed to the eyes. Together, these studies demonstrate that informal social control is a key to understanding rural–urban differences in interpersonal regret.

Seeking help from close, same-sex friends: Relational costs for Japanese and personal costs for European Canadians

Seeking help from close friends is beneficial for help seekers but also entails costs. Past research on social support suggested that East Asians were more likely than their North American counterparts to perceive relational costs (e.g., causing trouble for close friends), whereas North Americans tended to selectively perceive personal costs (e.g., admitting incompetence). We first collected European Canadian and Japanese people’s everyday experiences of help-seeking behaviors. We then examined whether norms would mediate the relationship between perceptions of costs and expected closeness in friendship. For European Canadians, we found such meditating relationships only for personal costs; whereas for the Japanese, the relationships were observed for both personal and relational costs. Implications for social cognitive research and clinical research are discussed.

Does a Major Earthquake Change Job Preferences and Human Values

Does a major natural disaster change human values and job preferences? The present studies examined whether the experience of a natural disaster experience shifts peoples values and job preferences toward pro–social directions. In Study 1 (cross–temporal analysis), we analysed job application data in nine cities in Japan over 12 years and found that the popularity of pro–social occupations (e.g. firefighter) increased after the Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake in 1995, in particular the area hit hardest by the quake. In Study 2 (a large national survey), we found that Japanese respondents who had experienced a major earthquake are more likely to hold a pro–social job than those who never experienced a major earthquake. Together, the current findings suggest that the experience of a major natural disaster shifts human values from the egocentric to the allocentric direction, which in turn could result in a social structure that values pro–social occupations. Copyright

Providing compensation promotes forgiveness for replaceable, but not irreplaceable, losses

ABSTRACT 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 showed that for those who reported losses of an experience or cherished material object, perpetrators’ offers of compensation did not facilitate forgiveness. In Study 2, by manipulating replaceability of hypothetical losses in vignettes, we showed that compensation for replaceable losses effectively elicits forgiveness from a victim, but compensation for irreplaceable losses is ineffective. A series of mediation analyses showed that the effect of replaceability on forgiveness is explained by the victim’s perception of whether their loss was sufficiently recovered. We discuss the function of compensation and its inherent limitations.

Cross-cultural consistency and relativity in the enjoyment of thinking versus doing.

Which is more enjoyable: trying to think enjoyable thoughts or doing everyday solitary activities? Wilson et al. (2014) found that American participants much preferred solitary everyday activities, such as reading or watching TV, to thinking for pleasure. To see whether this preference generalized outside of the United States, we replicated the study with 2,557 participants from 12 sites in 11 countries. The results were consistent in every country: Participants randomly assigned to do something reported significantly greater enjoyment than did participants randomly assigned to think for pleasure. Although we found systematic differences by country in how much participants enjoyed thinking for pleasure, we used a series of nested structural equation models to show that these differences were fully accounted for by country-level variation in 5 individual differences, 4 of which were positively correlated with thinking for pleasure (need for cognition, openness to experience, meditation experience, and initial positive affect) and 1 of which was negatively correlated (reported phone usage). (PsycINFO Database Record