BackgroundStudies on the survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami have revealed eight factors, called power to live, which are closely related to resilience and effective coping after intense and prolonged stress. However, whether the eight factors, which were examined in adults, are applicable to children is unclear. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the eight-factor structure of power to live was present since late childhood.MethodA 34-item power to live questionnaire was filled by middle- to upper-grade elementary (n = 378) and junior high school students (n = 456). Moreover, because elementary school students may lack introspective ability, their power to live was evaluated through a parental assessment (n = 358). Additionally, we examined the relationship between each power to live factor and questions regarding disaster prevention awareness among 25 elementary school students.ResultsThe results from confirmatory factor analysis for factor structure revealed generally acceptable fit indices. The reports from elementary school students and their parents significantly positively correlated with each power to live factor. Although reliability indices for factors such as stubbornness, etiquette, self-transcendence, and active well-being were not good for elementary school students, the reliability indices for all factors, excluding stubbornness, increased in junior high school students. Moreover, we identified a correlation between problem-solving, altruism, and emotional regulation and questionnaire items regarding awareness of disaster prevention in elementary school students.ConclusionOur results suggest that although factors common to adults, such as leadership, problem-solving, altruism, and emotional regulation, were identified at the elementary school stage, some factors, such as stubbornness, are in the process of being formed. Future studies should examine the developmental changes assumed to underlie these factors and their relationship to experience and neurodevelopmental basis.

Distracted attention is considered responsible for most car accidents, and many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) researchers have addressed its neural correlates using a car-driving simulator. Previous studies, however, have not directly addressed safe driving performance and did not place pedestrians in the simulator environment. In this fMRI study, we simulated a pedestrian-rich environment to explore the neural correlates of three types of safe driving performance: accurate lane-keeping during driving (driving accuracy), the braking response to a preceding car, and the braking response to a crossing pedestrian. Activation of the bilateral frontoparietal control network predicted high driving accuracy. On the other hand, activation of the left posterior and right anterior superior temporal sulci preceding a sudden pedestrian crossing predicted a slow braking response. The results suggest the involvement of different cognitive processes in different components of driving safety: the facilitatory effect of maintained attention on driving accuracy and the distracting effect of social–cognitive processes on the braking response to pedestrians.

Many people have experienced the inability to recognize a familiar face in a changed context, a phenomenon known as the “butcher-on-the-bus” effect. Whether this context effect is a facilitation of memory by old contexts or a disturbance of memory by novel contexts is of great debate. Here, we investigated how two types of contextual information associated with target faces influence the recognition performance of the faces using meaningful (scene) or meaningless (scrambled scene) backgrounds. The results showed two different effects of contexts: (1) disturbance on face recognition by changes of scene backgrounds and (2) weak facilitation of face recognition by the re-presentation of the same backgrounds, be it scene or scrambled. The results indicate that the facilitation and disturbance of context effects are actually caused by two different subcomponents of the background information: semantic information available from scene backgrounds and visual array information commonly included in a scene and its scrambled picture. This view suggests visual working memory system can control such context information, so that it switches the way to deal with the contexts information; inhibiting it as a distracter or activating it as a cue for recognizing the current target.

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Sincere praise reliably conveys positive or negative feedback, while flattery always conveys positive but unreliable feedback. These two praise types have not been compared in terms of communication effectiveness and individual preferences using neuroimaging. Through functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured brain activity when healthy young participants received sincere praise or flattery after performing a visual search task. Higher activation was observed in the right nucleus accumbens during sincere praise than during flattery, and praise reliability correlated with posterior cingulate cortex activity, implying a rewarding effect of sincere praise. In line with this, sincere praise uniquely activated several cortical areas potentially involved in concern regarding others’ evaluations. A high praise-seeking tendency was associated with lower activation of the inferior parietal sulcus during sincere praise compared to flattery after poor task performance, potentially reflecting suppression of negative feedback to maintain self-esteem. In summary, the neural dynamics of the rewarding and socio-emotional effects of praise differed.