No abstract

People have the capacity both to influence their environment and to adjust to it, but the United States and Japan are said to emphasize these processes differently. The authors suggest that Americans and Japanese develop distinct psychological characteristics, which are attuned to social practices that emphasize influence (in the United States) and adjustment (in Japan). American participants could remember more, and more recent, situations that involve influence, and Japanese respondents could remember more, and more recent, situations that involve adjustment. Second, American-made influence situations evoked stronger feelings of efficacy, whereas Japanese-made adjustment situations evoked stronger feelings of relatedness. Third, Americans reported more efficacy than Japanese, especially when responding to influence situations. Japanese felt more interpersonally close than Americans, especially when responding to adjustment situations. Surprisingly, U.S. influence situations also made people feel close to others, perhaps because they involved influencing other people.

Westerners' perceptions tend to focus on salient foreground objects, whereas Asians are more inclined to focus on contexts. We hypothesized that such culturally specific patterns of attention may be afforded by the perceptual environment of each culture. In order to test this hypothesis, we randomly sampled pictures of scenes from small, medium, and large cities in Japan and the United States. Using both subjective and objective measures, Study 1 demonstrated that Japanese scenes were more ambiguous and contained more elements than American scenes. Japanese scenes thus may encourage perception of the context more than American scenes. In Study 2, pictures of locations in cities were presented as primes, and participants' subsequent patterns of attention were measured. Both Japanese and American participants primed with Japanese scenes attended more to contextual information than did those primed with American scenes. These results provide evidence that culturally characteristic environments may afford distinctive patterns of perception.

Four studies examined the hypothesis that, although people may generally want to savor, rather than to dampen, their positive emotions (i.e., hedonic emotion regulation), such a hedonic emotion regulation tendency should be less pronounced for Easterners than for Westerners. Using retrospective memory procedures, Study 1 found that Easterners recalled engaging in hedonic emotion regulation less than Westerners did, even after controlling for their initial emotional reactions. Studies 2-3 showed that cultural differences in emotion regulation were mediated by dialectical beliefs about positive emotions. Study 4 replicated the findings by examining online reports of emotion regulation strategies on the day students received a good grade. Furthermore, there were cultural differences in actual emotion change over time, which was partly explained by dialectical beliefs about positive emotions. These findings highlight the active role cultural scripts play in shaping emotion regulation and emotional experiences.

Superelastic materials (crystal-to-crystal transformation pseudo elasticity) that consist of organic components have not been observed since superelasticity was discovered in a Au-Cd alloy in 1932. Superelastic materials have been exclusively developed in metallic or inorganic covalent solids, as represented by Ti-Ni alloys. Organosuperelasticity is now revealed in a pure organic crystal of terephthalamide, which precisely produces a large motion with high repetition and high energy storage efficiency. This process is driven by a small shear stress owing to the low density of strain energy related to the low lattice energy.