Curiosity is a fundamental part of human motivation that supports a variety of human intellectual behaviors ranging from early learning in children to scientific discovery. However, there has been little attention paid to the role of curiosity in aging populations. By bringing together broad but sparse neuroscientific and psychological literature on curiosity and related concepts (e.g., novelty seeking in older adults), we propose that curiosity, although it declines with age, plays an important role in maintaining cognitive function, mental health, and physical health in older adults. We identify the dopaminergic reward system and the noradrenergic system as the key brain systems implicated in curiosity processing and discuss how these brain systems contribute to the relationship between curiosity and adaptive aging.

The valuable relationships hypothesis posits that people are inclined to reconcile with their valuable-relationship partners. Focusing on a particular type of credible conciliatory signal (i.e., costly apology), the present study tested this hypothesis from the perpetrator's perspective. In studies 1 and 2, after imagining that they had committed an interpersonal transgression against one of their real friends, participants (N = 529 and 311 in studies 1 and 2, respectively) rated their willingness to incur a cost in order to apologize to the victim. Apology cost was operationalized as "canceling plans to make an apology as soon as possible" in study 1, and as "offering compensation" in study 2. The results showed that the instrumentality of the partner to achieving the participants' goals would increase their willingness to make a costly apology, after controlling for the participants' sex, version of the transgression scenario, closeness to the victim, and expected forgiveness of the victim. To ensure the external validity of this finding, studies 3 and 4 asked participants to recall one of their interpersonal transgression experiences, and to report whether they had offered compensation for it (N = 190 and 224 in studies 3 and 4, respectively). Study 3 confirmed the hypothesis, while study 4 did not directly support it. However, study 4 did show that participants were more willing to reconcile with their valuable partners. Taken together, these results indicate that the valuable relationships hypothesis applies not only to victims, but also to their perpetrators as well.

Does a major natural disaster change human values and job preferences? The present studies examined whether the experience of a natural disaster experience shifts people's values and job preferences toward pro‐social directions. In Study 1 (cross‐temporal analysis), we analysed job application data in nine cities in Japan over 12 years and found that the popularity of pro‐social occupations (e.g. firefighter) increased after the Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake in 1995, in particular the area hit hardest by the quake. In Study 2 (a large national survey), we found that Japanese respondents who had experienced a major earthquake are more likely to hold a pro‐social job than those who never experienced a major earthquake. Together, the current findings suggest that the experience of a major natural disaster shifts human values from the egocentric to the allocentric direction, which in turn could result in a social structure that values pro‐social occupations. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology

Recent experimental studies have accumulated evidence about self-punishment. In accordance with the evolutionary perspective that shame has a reputation-maintenance function, we speculated that shame would promote self-punishment. Accordingly, we tested whether proneness to shame would predict self-punishment. In the first phase of the experiment, 98 undergraduates completed the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA), a standard measure of proneness to shame and guilt. About two months later, 50 of the original participants took part in a self-punishment experiment, in which they all unintentionally made an unfair resource allocation, and then had the opportunity to inflict self-punishment by abandoning some of the money they had allocated to themselves. The amount of money the participants relinquished was significantly correlated with their shame-proneness. The intensity of post-transgression shame mediated the effect of shame-proneness on self-punishment. These results provide support for the evolutionary theorization of shame as a reputation-maintenance emotion.

Three autobiographical studies tested the valuable relationships hypothesis of forgiveness. Although previous studies revealed that relationship value predicts interpersonal forgiveness, the measure of relationship value may be conflated with affective assessments of the relationship with the transgressor, which might have caused a criterion contamination problem. Therefore, we assessed the goal-related instrumentality of the transgressor (i.e., how useful the transgressor is for helping the victim to achieve his/her goals in fitness-relevant domains). Three studies, one involving a Japanese student sample (Study 1), a second involving Japanese community sample (Study 2), and a third involving U.S. community sample (Study 3), convergently showed that perceived goal instrumentality, as well as a latent relationship value variable estimated from multiple measures of relationship value, are associated with forgiveness. Moreover, this association could be explained in part by the intermediate association of perceived goal instrumentality with empathy both in Japan and the U.S.