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Abstract While the negative impact of the pandemic on students’ mental health has been studied around the world, very little is known about the mental health of faculty and staff. This research aims to examine mental health among Japanese faculty members who taught online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recruited 537 university faculty members and assessed their mental health using the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5), both retrospectively (during the academic year before the onset of the pandemic) and during the pandemic. We also evaluated workload (number of online lectures taught and preparation time per class), difficulty in using information technology (IT) for online classes, and satisfaction with the university support service for online education. As a result, the WHO-5 score during the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly lower than before, and 33.5% of the faculty members were recognized as being at risk for mental illness during the COVID-19 pandemic. A binomial logistic regression analysis revealed two significant risk factors for mental illness—faculty members were more at risk for mental illness when they experienced difficulty in using IT for online classes, and were unsatisfied with the administrative support for online education. The deterioration of mental health during the COVID-19 was not predicted by workload, such as the number of online lectures and preparation time. These results suggest the importance of improving workplace support services, especially IT support, to prevent mental health deterioration among faculty teaching online.

We are emotionally moved when we give birth to a child, witness the triumph of an athlete, listen to a beautiful piece of music, and so forth. Such moving experiences have been described as a form of emotion, by terms such as being moved, awe, and kama muta, each of which have been studied as a separate, but interrelated, psychological phenomenon. Japanese people use the term kando to describe these experiences collectively. In this study, we propose that kando should be treated as an umbrella term covering being moved, awe, and kama muta. To this end, we reviewed the literature on kando conducted by Japanese researchers and compared it to relevant concepts, mainly examined in Western countries. We also reviewed the literature on the generative mechanism of kando, and established that emotional and physical reactions are important to determine the degree of kando across the cases with and without storyline. Furthermore, individual characteristics such as trait empathy may generate a stronger degree of kando. Kando experiences can affect subsequent behaviors and cognition, though we still need evidence that such change can be triggered genuinely by the experience of kando. We suggest that kando may make our neuro-cognitive network tend toward more direct, unconscious, and impulsive decision making. One of the remaining questions in this domain is whether the mental construct of kando can find an equivalent to people in Western countries. For this purpose, events and reactions relevant to kando experiences should be systematically collected from a broad population.

We investigated the effects of social interaction and out-of-class study time on foreign language proficiency and use among two hundred students from a Japanese university who studied abroad for one month. Participants' use of English and English proficiency were measured before and after the programme. Interaction with people from other cultures and out-of-class study time while abroad were also reported. Based on social interaction and out-of-class study time, students were grouped into four clusters: an "Unengaged" cluster, with low levels of interaction and out-of-class study time; a "Balanced" cluster, with average levels of both interaction and study time; a "Studious" cluster, with high out-of-class study time but low interaction levels; and a "Communicative" cluster, with high interaction levels but low study time. Analyses of clusters' main effects revealed that overall, the "Studious" group had higher English proficiency, and the "Balanced" and "Communicative" groups reported higher use of English than the "Unengaged" group. While English proficiency increased to the same degree in all four groups, the "Balanced" group gained more in English use compared to the "Unengaged" group after study abroad. The results suggest the importance of how students spend their time abroad in promoting foreign language use.

This study proposes a new method for detecting and preventing proxy test-taking in online examinations using a tablet device that authenticates the identity of examinees based on multiple types of touch gestures. We proved that the support vector machine has the best performance among classifiers for authentication when various touch gestures are used and various positions on the screen are touched. The results also showed that if support vector machine is used as the classifier, a handshape image taken from above or from the side can be used for identity authentication. In the future, we will improve the experimental environment to make it more similar to an actual online examination and investigate the possibility of performing authentication using touch gestures at arbitrary points on the touch screen of a tablet device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]