Fujio Yoshida

Perceiving a story outside of conscious awareness: When we infer narrative attributes from subliminal sequential stimuli.

Perceiving a story behind successive movements plays an important role in our lives. From a general perspective, such higher mental activity would seem to depend on conscious processes. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, we demonstrated that such story perception occurs without conscious awareness. In the experiments, participants were subliminally presented with sequential pictures that represented a story in which one geometrical figure was chased by the other figure, and in which one fictitious character defeated the other character in a tug-of-war. Although the participants could not report having seen the pictures, their automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) were shifted to line up with the story. The results suggest that story perception operates outside of conscious awareness. Implications for research on the unconscious were also briefly discussed.

Rule-breaking in an anonymous situation: When people decide to deviate from existing rules

The present study examined how soon people would make a decision to break existing rules in an anonymous situation, with particular attention paid to the degree of anonymity. A total of 100 participants were randomly assigned to either a self-reward condition or an other-reward condition, in both of which they were asked to flip a coin twice in each of the four coin-flip trials to win the assigned reward. As predicted, the results showed that only participants in the self-reward condition broke the assignment rules for obtaining the reward, and they only did so in the very last coin-flip trial. In sum, the present findings suggest that people do not break existing rules for material gain as soon as they become anonymized, but some may do so at the very last moment.

暴力映像が視聴者の感情・認知・生理反応に及ぼす影響

The present study investigated the effects of media violence on affective, cognitive, and physiological reactions of viewers. Eighty undergraduate student (male = 40, female = 40) participated in the experiment. First, subjects were exposed to one of four violent films whose levels of violence and entertainment were based on ratings taken in a previous study (Yoshida & Yukawa, 1996). Immediately after viewing the film, subjects described their thoughts which occurred during watching the film and rated their affective reactions toward the film. Heart rate and eyeblink rate as indicators of physiological arousal were measured continuously before, during, and after the film. Results showed that the film high in violence elicited more negative and empty-powerless affects, while the film high in entertainment evoked more positive affects.

The effect of ingroup-outgroup comparison context on black sheep effect. An analysis from a social identity perspective.

Based on social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978), it is expected that black sheep effect occurs only in cases where ingroup members are compared with outgroup individuals. In study 1, 112 female student nurses were divided into two groups, and evaluated both outgroup and ingroup individuals (outgroup-ingroup condition), or ingroup members only (ingroup-only condition). Black sheep effect was found only in the outgroup-ingroup condition. Ingroup members in the condition were evaluated more extremely than those in the ingroup-only condition, and there was no significant difference between the evaluations of outgroup individuals in the outgroup-ingroup condition and ingroup members in the ingroup-only condition. The results confirmed the ingroup-outgroup comparison prediction. In study 2, in addition to rating four individuals, desirable or undesirable and ingroup or outgroup, 86 female student nurses were asked to indicate the importance of their own social identity. Mack sheep effect was observed, with perception of ingroup homogeneity strengthening ingroup identification, thereby facilitating black sheep effect. These findings support Turners self categorization theory (1982) as an explanation of the mechanism for black sheep effect.