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BackgroundMindfulness meditation, comprising focused attention and open monitoring meditations, has been shown to enhance performance on cognitive interference tasks. While this enhancement has been considered not to result from distractor inhibition, no empirical evidence has been provided through behavioral data. In this study, we investigated whether 30-min interventions of focused attention and open monitoring meditations could reduce distractor inhibition in 72 meditation-naïve participants divided into focused attention meditation, open monitoring meditation, and control groups.MethodsWe employed a task set that combined a cognitive interference task with subsequent preference judgment and surprise recognition tasks, utilizing the mere exposure effect paradigm, along with state and trait questionnaires. The mere exposure effect shows that repeated exposure to face images increases one’s preference for them. However, this effect is reduced if participants consciously or unconsciously try to inhibit the face images during stimulus processing. In the cognitive interference task, they judged the direction of the letter superimposed on a distractor face image. In the subsequent preference judgment task, they were asked to rate the preference of face images, half of which were presented in the interference task and the remaining half were not presented. We hypothesized that inhibiting face images presented as distractors would lead to a decrease in preference for them.Results and discussionsWe found that the mere exposure effect was observed in focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation groups but not in the control group, indicating that compared to the control, focused attention and open monitoring meditations reduce inhibition processes for distractors during cognitive interference tasks. Furthermore, we found a positive correlation between the intensity of the mere exposure effect and state relaxation before the cognitive interference task as well as a negative correlation between the intensity of the mere exposure effect and state anxiety in the focused attention meditation group, but not in the open monitoring meditation group. This suggests that the processes of reducing inhibition in focused attention and open monitoring meditations differ. Our findings contribute to understanding the attentional mechanisms underlying mindfulness meditation during cognitive interference.

Despite robots being applied in various situations of modern society, some people avoid them or do not feel comfortable interacting with them. Designs that allow robots to interact appropriately with people will make a positive impression on them resulting in a better evaluation of robots, which will solve this problem. To establish such a design, this study conducted two scenario-based experiments focusing on the politeness of the robot’s conversation and behavior, and examined the impressions caused when the robot succeeds or slightly fails at a task. These two experiments revealed that regardless of whether the partner is a robot or a human, politeness not only affected the impression of interaction but also the expectations for better task results on the next occasion. Although the effect of politeness on preference toward robot agents was smaller than those toward human agents when agents failed a task, people were more likely to interact with polite robots and human agents again because they thought that they would not fail the next time. This study revealed that politeness motivates people to interact with robots repeatedly even if they make minor mistakes, suggesting that the politeness design is important for encouraging human-robot interaction.

Robots have tremendous potential, and have recently been introduced not only for simple operations in factories, but also in workplaces where customer service communication is required. However, communication robots have not always been accepted. This study proposes a three-stage (first contact, interaction, and decision) model for robot acceptance based on the human cognitive process flow to design preferred robots and clarifies the elements of the robot and the processes that affect robot acceptance decision-making. Unlike previous robot acceptance models, the current model focuses on a sequential account of how people decide to accept, considering the interaction (or carry-over) effect between impressions established at each stage. According to the model, this study conducted a scenario-based experiment focusing on the impression of the first contact (a robot’s appearance) and that formed during the interaction with robot (politeness of its conversation and behavior) on robot acceptance in both successful and slightly failed situations. The better the appearance of the robot and the more polite its behavior, the greater the acceptance rate. Importantly, there was no interaction between these two factors. The results indicating that the impressions of the first contact and interaction are additively processed suggest that we should accumulate findings that improving the appearance of the robot and making its communication behavior more human-like in politeness will lead to a more acceptable robot design.

Social exclusion affects the fundamental needs of individuals, and their coping behavior is moderated by their dispositional need to belong. Eating can be one such behavior. However, it is unclear how people with a higher or lower dispositional need to belong respond with respect to food consumption in response to social exclusion. Thus, this study aims to investigate which of these groups eat more food after social exclusion. Ninety-seven university students in Japan participated in two types of Cyberball games (where they either experienced social exclusion or social inclusion) in which their social exclusion status was manipulated. They subsequently participated in a test in which they ate as many cookies as they desired. Finally, they answered questions about their dispositional need to belong. Their BMI was also recorded. Results showed that when socially excluded, individuals with a low need to belong increased their consumption, while those with a high need to belong did not. We suggest that people with a lower need to belong are more inclined to focus on goals other than inclusion and instead use eating as a coping mechanism.

Adaptation and aftereffect are well-known procedures for exploring our neural representation of visual stimuli. It has been reported that they occur in face identity, facial expressions, and low-level visual features. This method has two primary advantages. One is to reveal the common or shared process of faces, that is, the overlapped or discrete representation of face identities or facial expressions. The other is to investigate the coding system or theory of face processing that underlies the ability to recognize faces. This study aims to organize recent research to guide the reader into the field of face adaptation and its aftereffect and to suggest possible future expansions in the use of this paradigm. To achieve this, we reviewed the behavioral short-term aftereffect studies on face identity (i.e., who it is) and facial expressions (i.e., what expressions such as happiness and anger are expressed), and summarized their findings about the neural representation of faces. First, we summarize the basic characteristics of face aftereffects compared to simple visual features to clarify that facial aftereffects occur at a different stage and are not inherited or combinations of low-level visual features. Next, we introduce the norm-based coding hypothesis, which is one of the theories used to represent face identity and facial expressions, and adaptation is a commonly used procedure to examine this. Subsequently, we reviewed studies that applied this paradigm to immature or impaired face recognition (i.e., children and individuals with autism spectrum disorder or prosopagnosia) and examined the relationships between their poor recognition performance and representations. Moreover, we reviewed studies dealing with the representation of non-presented faces and social signals conveyed via faces and discussed that the face adaptation paradigm is also appropriate for these types of examinations. Finally, we summarize the research conducted to date and propose a new direction for the face adaptation paradigm.

When building personal relationships, it is important to select optimal partners, even based on the first meeting. This study was inspired by the idea that people who smile are considered more trustworthy and attractive. However, this may not always be true in daily life. Previous studies have used a relatively simple method of judging others by presenting a photograph of one person’s face. To move beyond this approach and examine more complex situations, we presented the faces of two people confronted with each other to participants and asked them to judge them from a third-person perspective. Through three experiments, participants were asked to judge which of the two persons was more appropriate for forming alliances, more trustworthy, or more attractive, respectively. In all experiments, images were shown for a short (500 ms) or a long time (5 s). In all three experiments, the results showed that participants were more likely to choose persons with happy faces than those with neutral, sad, or angry faces when the image presentation was short. Contrarily, the facial expressions did not affect those judgments when the image presentation was long. Instead, judgments were correlated with personality estimated from the model’s neutral face in a single-person presentation. These results suggest that although facial expressions can affect the judgments of others when observing two-person confrontations from a third-person perspective, when participants have more time to elaborate their judgments, they go beyond expressions.

Recent cultural studies have discussed universality and diversity in human behavior using numerous samples investigated worldwide. We aimed to quantitatively extend this discussion to various research activities in psychology in terms of geographic regions and time trends. Most psychology departments have specialists in various fields of psychology. Further, research institutions in all regions typically aim to provide systematic and balanced research education. Nevertheless, most researchers recognize universal features and patterns of diversity in research activities in psychology in terms of regional differences and time trends. However, these arguments remain intuitive and vague, and no studies have conducted quantitative analyses. To this end, we conducted topic modeling for the abstracts of psychological articles with the regions of author affiliations and publication periods as covariates. The results showed that the topic proportions related to basic research were high in North-Central America, whereas those related to clinical research were high in Europe. Interestingly, the regional differences shown by topic modeling were not observed in the frequency analysis of keywords, indicating that topic modeling revealed implicit characteristics. Moreover, we observed an increasing trend of neuroscience topics across publication periods. However, this trend was not valid for the psychology journal Psychological Science. Taken together, our results suggest diversity of geographic regions and periods in research activities in psychology. More importantly, our findings indicate that universality holds neither for human behavior nor research activities on human mental processes.

Abstract Background Recent experimental work has shown that hyper-realistic face masks can pass for real faces during live viewing. However, live viewing embeds the perceptual task (mask detection) in a powerful social context that may influence respondents’ behaviour. To remove this social context, we assessed viewers’ ability to distinguish photos of hyper-realistic masks from photos of real faces in a computerised two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) procedure. Results In experiment 1 (N = 120), we observed an error rate of 33% when viewing time was restricted to 500 ms. In experiment 2 (N = 120), we observed an error rate of 20% when viewing time was unlimited. In both experiments we saw a significant performance cost for other-race comparisons relative to own-race comparisons. Conclusions We conclude that viewers could not reliably distinguish hyper-realistic face masks from real faces in photographic presentations. As well as its theoretical interest, failure to detect synthetic faces has important implications for security and crime prevention, which often rely on facial appearance and personal identity being related.

Regarding the effects of joint action on visual memory, previous research has focused on the memory of a single object that a participant and their co-actor attended together (i.e., a shared situation), while the literature on memory has demonstrated that spatial regularity composed of multiple objects can also be learned. We aimed to examine whether the visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects could be strongly encoded. We repeatedly presented the same configuration of two targets and two sets of distractors in different colors (i.e., blue and red) to participants. In Experiment 1, pairs of participants simultaneously searched for the same target in the joint group while individual participants searched for the target alone in the single group. As a result, greater facilitation in reaction time was observed in earlier epochs in the joint group, reinforced by the learning of visuospatial regularity, compared to the single group. Experiment 2 examined whether the co-actor's attended context could be strongly encoded although two persons simultaneously searched for different targets (i.e., parallel situation) such that one searched for the blue target and the other for the red target. The results showed no evidence regarding participants' learning visuospatial regularity of the co-actor's attended objects, indicating that co-actor's learning information cannot be shared in this situation. This study revealed that facilitation of visuospatial learning in joint action would require two individuals to attend to the same objects when they perform the task.

Abstract We often identify people using face images. This is true in occupational settings such as passport control as well as in everyday social environments. Mapping between images and identities assumes that facial appearance is stable within certain bounds. For example, a person’s apparent age, gender and ethnicity change slowly, if at all. It also assumes that deliberate changes beyond these bounds (i.e., disguises) would be easy to spot. Hyper-realistic face masks overturn these assumptions by allowing the wearer to look like an entirely different person. If unnoticed, these masks break the link between facial appearance and personal identity, with clear implications for applied face recognition. However, to date, no one has assessed the realism of these masks, or specified conditions under which they may be accepted as real faces. Herein, we examined incidental detection of unexpected but attended hyper-realistic masks in both photographic and live presentations. Experiment 1 (UK; n = 60) revealed no evidence for overt detection of hyper-realistic masks among real face photos, and little evidence of covert detection. Experiment 2 (Japan; n = 60) extended these findings to different masks, mask-wearers and participant pools. In Experiment 3 (UK and Japan; n = 407), passers-by failed to notice that a live confederate was wearing a hyper-realistic mask and showed limited evidence of covert detection, even at close viewing distance (5 vs. 20 m). Across all of these studies, viewers accepted hyper-realistic masks as real faces. Specific countermeasures will be required if detection rates are to be improved.

Forming specific facial expressions influences emotions and perception. Bearing this in mind, studies should be reconsidered in which observers expressing neutral emotions inferred personal traits from the facial expressions of others. In the present study, participants were asked to make happy, neutral, and disgusted facial expressions: for “happy,” they held a wooden chopstick in their molars to form a smile; for “neutral,” they clasped the chopstick between their lips, making no expression; for “disgusted,” they put the chopstick between their upper lip and nose and knit their brows in a scowl. However, they were not asked to intentionally change their emotional state. Observers judged happy expression images as more trustworthy, competent, warm, friendly, and distinctive than disgusted expression images, regardless of the observers' own facial expression. Observers judged disgusted expression images as more dominant than happy expression images. However, observers expressing disgust overestimated dominance in observed disgusted expression images and underestimated dominance in happy expression images. In contrast, observers with happy facial forms attenuated dominance for disgusted expression images. These results suggest that dominance inferred from facial expressions is unstable and influenced by not only the observed facial expression, but also the observers' own physiological states.

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.