During the COVID-19 pandemic, social interactions were restricted, including community services for disabled older adults. This study aimed to describe the change of use in community services related to long-term care insurance (LTCI) during the pandemic in Japan. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted using data collected via a cloud-based management support platform for older adult care provider “Kaipoke”, by a private-sector company “SMS Co., Ltd.”, in which care-managers of LTCI manage their office work. Data collection occurred from July 2019 to June 2020. Study subjects were LTCI service users aged 65 years and above. Subjects were living at home. We examined changes in the number of users of LTCI services before and after the COVID-19 pandemic began, using an interrupted time-series analysis. Results indicated that the use of outpatient services was reduced; however, home-visit services were maintained. The decrease in use was significant in the seven prefectures where the infection initially spread. There are concerns that older adults or surrounding caregivers can be affected by such changes in LTC service use. It is therefore necessary to implement sustainable measures from a long-term perspective and investigate their influence as part of future studies.

T HE NATIONAL ADULT Reading Test (NART), which measures participants' ability to read irregularly spelled English words, is a useful method for estimating IQ and premorbid IQ in patients with mental illness. 1 The Japanese Adult Reading Test (JART) was also developed for estimating IQ; it measures an individual's ability to read 50 Kanji words.2 The JART has good validity compared to IQ measured using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised 2,3 and -III.4 A 25-item short version of the JART (JART25) has also been validated, 3 and because of its simplicity, has been widely used in psychiatric studies in Japan.The original version of the JART is administered using a face-to-face interview. A participant is instructed to say aloud 50 Kanji words from a list. Japanese language has three types of characters: Kanji is based on lexical morphemes, while hiragana and katakana are segmental scripts that consist of one or more graphemes (mora) for each hiragana (katakana) word. As the phonological characters of the Japanese language can be almost identical between writing and reading hiragana (katakana), the JART could be administered using a paperand-pencil format. It is common for Japanese school children to learn how to read and write Kanji using hiragana. Therefore, the paper-and-pencil version of the JART could estimate IQ more efficiently than a face-to-face interview because interviewers would not be necessary. Here, we tested the reliability of a paper-and-pencil version of the JART compared to the original version.Fifty-two healthy participants whose native language was Japanese participated in this study (female = 36; mean age = 33.4 years [SD = 12.2,). This study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, and all participants gave written informed consent. All participants took the paper-and-pencil version of the JART25 first in a self-reported questionnaire, and were then administered the original version of the JART25 within a 12-month interval by three psychologists. In the paper-and-pencil version, a participant was given the same instructions as the original version, 2,3 and was also asked to respond without looking up any of the items.The results showed that the paper-and-pencil version of the JART25 had almost perfect consistency with the original interview version (Paper: 110.7 [6.9], interview: 110.6 [7.1]; intraclass correlation coefficient (2,1) = 0.95, P < 0.001). Thus, the paper-and-pencil version of the JART25 retains the accuracy of the original face-to-face version.We provide the detailed method for implementation of the paper-and-pencil version of the JART25 (http://npsy.umin.jp/ indicator.html). DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

Although a close relationship between the emergence of a new expression and that of either a new object or concept is presupposed in linguistic analysis, the correlation has not been pursued thoroughly. This paper investigates how people respond to different novel textures within language. We carried out an experiment using an application that displays visually-induced texture. Participants were presented with two types of novel texture: one had a time delay between touching and the texture's response to this and the other did not. Participants were asked to describe the texture with ideophones (sound symbolic words) in Japanese. We observed what kinds of ideophones were used and the confidence with which they were expressed, which produced two results. First, there was a significant difference between the two texture types regarding confidence. For the texture with a delay, active touch was required for subjects to express it with a high level of confidence. Second, when the expressions were made with high confidence, the texture with a delay was expressed with significantly more unconventional ideophones than that without delay.

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