The Relationship Between Hostile Intent Attribution and Aggression in Japanese Children.

Previous studies showed that hostile intent attribution (HIA) was significantly correlated with and contributed to the development of aggression in children. Studies that directly examined the factors that explained the relationship between HIA and aggression are lacking. Hence, this study investigated (a) the correlation between HIA and aggression and (b) the variables (hyperactivity, prosociality, and collaborative problem-solving) that mediated the relationship between HIA and aggression in Japanese children aged 4-9 years. The participants were 180 children and their caregivers. First, the caregivers reported their children's aggression, hyperactivity, prosociality, and collaborative problem-solving through questionnaires. Next, the children worked on an HIA task. The results showed a weak positive correlation between HIA and aggression. Furthermore, significant indirect effects were observed among all the mediation models. The model that contained all three mediators yielded the smallest Akaike Information Criterion value. In this model, the indirect effect was significant only for the path with hyperactivity as the mediator. These findings provide several suggestions for revealing the mechanism of the relationship between HIA and aggression during childhood. Notably, children's hyperactivity was suggested to play a particularly important role in the relationship between HIA and aggression.

Cross-sectional survey of the replacement of the Japanese term for dementia: Did it reduce discomfort in family members?

OBJECTIVES: Decreasing discrimination and stigma of dementia is an international issue. In 2004, the Japanese government changed the previous Japanese stigmatic term of dementia ("Chiho") to the present one ("Ninchi-sho") a meaning near "neurocognitive disorder." This study aimed to examine cross-sectionally if the present term functioned well or not from the viewpoint of families of people with dementia (PWD), and to discover variables influencing their feelings of the term: the feelings about people surrounding PWD, and the family members' and PWD's attributes. METHODS: Questions regarding the feelings about the present Japanese term and people surrounding PWD were asked to 155 family members accompanying PWD who visited three hospitals. For analyses, the degree of the discomfort about the present Japanese term was shown descriptively. The relationship of constructs of the feelings extracted by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the attributes was analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). RESULTS: 71.6% agreed that the present term discomforted them less than the previous one. Only 13.2% thought that the present term was discriminatory. However, about one third of the participants felt discomfort when they used even the present term. Using the constructs extracted by EFA, the analysis of SEM revealed that the negative feelings of the terminology were affected by hesitation to disclose to surrounding people that their family member had dementia, which the attributes of younger family members, wives, husbands, and siblings influenced. Moreover, because of disclosing the dementia, the feelings of support from people alleviated the feelings of hesitation, influenced by sex (female). CONCLUSIONS: It was suggested that overall, the present term successfully reduced discomfort in families, compared with the result of the previous term surveyed by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. However, unignorable numbers of family members still feel stigma. New policies are necessary considering the influencing factors.

Modeling reciprocal effects in medical research: Critical discussion on the current practices and potential alternative models.

Longitudinal designs provide a strong inferential basis for uncovering reciprocal effects or causality between variables. For this analytic purpose, a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) has been widely used in medical research, but the use of the CLPM has recently been criticized in methodological literature because parameter estimates in the CLPM conflate between-person and within-person processes. The aim of this study is to present some alternative models of the CLPM that can be used to examine reciprocal effects, and to illustrate potential consequences of ignoring the issue. A literature search, case studies, and simulation studies are used for this purpose. We examined more than 300 medical papers published since 2009 that applied cross-lagged longitudinal models, finding that in all studies only a single model (typically the CLPM) was performed and potential alternative models were not considered to test reciprocal effects. In 49% of the studies, only two time points were used, which makes it impossible to test alternative models. Case studies and simulation studies showed that the CLPM and alternative models often produce different (or even inconsistent) parameter estimates for reciprocal effects, suggesting that research that relies only on the CLPM may draw erroneous conclusions about the presence, predominance, and sign of reciprocal effects. Simulation studies also showed that alternative models are sometimes susceptible to improper solutions, even when reseachers do not misspecify the model.

Prevalence of imaginary companions in Japanese children.

Having an imaginary companion (IC) is an example of children's pretend play. However, most research regarding children's ICs is from Western cultures. In this study, the prevalence of ICs was assessed among Japanese children (2- to 9-year-old children, N = 800). The developmental (age), biological (sex), and environmental (birth order) effects on Japanese children's ICs were also assessed. Moreover, whether IC status can be an indicator of fantasy orientation in Japanese children was examined. The results revealed that the prevalence of the invisible friend was relatively rare, but the personified object was prevalent in Japanese children. Age and sex, but not birth order, significantly affected the prevalence of ICs in Japan. Moreover, IC status significantly indicated children's fantasy orientation. The results suggest that the characteristics of Japanese children's ICs are partly different from those in Western children. Social-cultural contexts can affect this difference.

Mind perception of God in Japanese children.

There is a theoretical debate regarding whether children represent God with reference to a human. Most previous studies have assessed this issue focusing on knowledge/omniscience in western children. This study used a theoretical framework characterising mental capacities in terms of motivational/emotional (experience) and cognitive (agency) mental capacities and tested whether Japanese children discriminated between God, a human, a baby and an invisible agent according to these capacities. Three- to 6-year-old children were asked about the experience and agency of the agents. The results revealed that children discriminated God from a human in terms of mental capacities including experience and agency in 3-year-old children. On the other hand, 4- to 6-year-old children, but not 3-year-old children, discriminated a human from a baby and an invisible person. The results suggest that the Japanese children's representations of God differed from their representation of a human during preschool years.

Changes in genetic and environmental influences on cognitive ability, executive function, and preacademic skills in Japanese preschool age twins.

Identifying the cognitive capacities associated with the development of school readiness is indispensable to support children's successful school transition. It has been shown that executive function (EF) in preschoolers is associated with both concurrent preacademic and subsequent academic skills. However, most research has controlled for the effect of general cognitive ability (GCA), and little research has examined non-English speaking children, which hinders the understanding of the development of school readiness in culturally diverse contexts. In addition, behavioral genetic research on the genetic and environmental influences on this association has been conducted with school-age children. Thus, the genetic and environmental influences on associations between GCA, EF, and preacademic skills during preschool age are unknown. We conducted multivariate behavioral genetic analyses on two waves of longitudinal data at 42 and 60 months of age from 171 and 135 pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic Japanese twins. The findings suggested that a genetic factor influenced GCA at 42 months and mediated preacademic ability at 60 months. In addition, another genetic factor emerged by 60 months that genetically mediated EF and math ability, independent of GCA. Preacademic ability at 60 months was affected by shared environments that influenced EF, rather than GCA, at 42 months. Moreover, shared environments that influenced preacademic ability at 42 months affected later GCA at 60 months. Finally, nonshared environments that had emerged by 60 months mediated these relationships, though the magnitude of this effect was modest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychometric properties of the Japanese CES-D, SDS, and PHQ-9 depression scales in university students.

We used an item response theory (IRT) model to simultaneously compare the psychometric properties of 3 commonly used self-report depression scales translated into Japanese-the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and the Patient Health Questionnaire Depression Scale (PHQ-9)-in a Japanese university student sample. Although the 3 scales were likely to measure the same underlying construct-that is, depression-the choices of the negatively worded items in the SDS and CES-D did not function well. The CES-D provided more information than the other scales at the range of depression severity approximately from the mean through 2 standard deviations above the mean, while the PHQ-9 provided more information for the other degrees of depression. The PHQ-9 performed better as a whole, as it provided more information than the other scales on the broadest range of depression severity, and it did not contain items with inefficient choices. The CES-D may also be a good choice when sampling students with elevated levels of depressive symptoms. Finally, we linked the 3 instruments on a common scale using parameters derived from IRT analysis, and we provided a crosswalk table to enable the conversion of each scale score. (PsycINFO Database Record

Goal Attribution toward Non-Human Objects during Infancy Predicts Imaginary Companion Status during Preschool Years.

It has been shown that there is a significant relationship between children's mentalizing skills and creation of an imaginary companion (IC). Theorists have proposed that interaction with an IC may improve mentalizing skills, but it is also possible that children's mentalizing skills affect their creation of an IC. In this longitudinal study, we examined whether goal attribution in infants younger than 1 years old (Time 1) predicted their creation of ICs at 48 months old (Time 2). At Time 1, infants' goal attribution was measured in an action prediction experiment, where infants anticipated three types of action goals: (1) another person's goal-directed action (GH condition); (2) another person's non-goal-directed (BH condition); and (3) a mechanical claw's goal-directed action (MC condition). At Time 2, parents completed questionnaires assessing whether their children had ICs. The path analyses using Bayesian estimation revealed that infants' anticipation in the MC condition, but not in the GH and BH conditions, predicted their later IC status. These results indicate that infants' goal attributions to non-human agents may be a strong predictor of their later IC creation. Early mentalizing skills toward non-human objects may provide children with a basis for their engagement in imaginative play.