Masao Yogo

The Cognitive, Emotional, and Social Impacts of the September 11 Attacks: Group Differences in Memory for the Reception Context and the Determinants of Flashbulb Memory

The authors examined group differences in memories for hearing the news of and reactions to the September 11 attacks in 2001. They measured memory for reception context (immediate memory for the circumstances in which people first heard the news) and 11 predictors of the consistency of memory for reception context over time (flashbulb memory). Shortly after 9/11, a questionnaire was distributed to 3,665 participants in 9 countries. U.S. vs. non-U.S. respondents showed large differences in self-rated importance of the news and in memory for event-related facts. The groups showed moderate differences in background knowledge and emotional-feeling states. Within non-U.S. groups, there were large differences for emotional-feeling states and moderate differences for personal rehearsal, background knowledge, and attitudes toward the United States. The authors discuss the implications of those findings for the study of group differences in memory and for the formation of flashbulb memories.

Working memory capacity can be improved by expressive writing: A randomized experiment in a Japanese sample

This study examined the influence of expressive writing on working memory capacity (WMC), a component of executive function. Japanese undergraduates (N=104) were individually tested across six separate experimental sessions (baseline, three writing, and two follow-up sessions at 1 and 5 weeks). Participants were randomly assigned to write about a traumatic experience, their best possible future selves (BPS), or a trivial topic for 20 minutes. WMC tests were completed at baseline and follow-ups. Results indicate that expressive writing about traumatic experience can improve WMC at 5 weeks after writing, but that writing about BPS or trivial topics has no effect on WMC.

Influence of Culture on Categorical Structure of Emotional Words: Comparison Between Japanese and Korean

This study targeted individuals from Korea and Japan to investigate whether their concepts of emotion can be classified as more prototypical (central concepts) and less typical exemplars (peripheral concepts), and how they distinguish them. In Study 1, participants listed examples of “emotion,” and the most frequently reported words were defined as central and others as peripheral concepts. Five central and five peripheral concepts chosen from Study 1 were used in the following four studies, which examined the characteristics of the two conceptual classes and how clearly these are distinguished by Japanese and Koreans. Study 2 identified how strongly the central and peripheral concepts were associated with the word “emotion,” and Study 3 evaluated how good these words were as examples of emotion. In Study 4, the central and peripheral words replaced a word “emotion” in a given sentence and participants assessed how natural the sentence sounded. Study 5 evaluated the fuzziness of the boundary between the central and peripheral concepts. The results of all the studies demonstrated that the concepts of emotion for both Japanese and Koreans are organized based on their typicality. The distinction between the central and peripheral concepts is, however, found to be much more ambiguous for Koreans than for Japanese. The present research revealed that there is a common structure for the concepts of emotion, but it also showed that culturally specific categorization styles as well as language variation can influence how people conceptualize emotion.