psychology

National / Social Issues | Longform Jun 20, 2022

Got a complaint? Japan's business owners want you to say it, not spray it.

by Rob Gilhooly

Japanese firms are struggling to deal with increasingly unreasonable demands from customers.

National / Media | BIG IN JAPAN May 1, 2021

Solitude or isolation? Whatever it is, it's spreading.

by Michael Hoffman

While humanity is a social species, there's something to be said about solitude. The good kind, that is.

World Apr 7, 2021

COVID-19 raises risks for mental and neurological disorders, study finds

Analyzing the health records of 236,379 COVID-19 patients, researchers found they had a 44% greater risk of neurological and mental health diagnoses than that seen after flu.

World / Social Issues Jan 30, 2021

A pandemic is hard enough. For some, being single has made it harder.

by Daniel Victor

“One day I realized it had been three months since I had touched a human being,” one man said.

National Aug 12, 2020

'Everyone else is doing it': Social conformity a top motive for Japanese to wear masks

A team of psychologists surveyed 1,000 people and found that the top reason for wearing masks was because everyone else was doing so.

Commentary / World Apr 27, 2020

COVID-19 has taken us from FOMO to ROMO

by Sara Green Carmichael

With everyone at home, the fear of missing out turns into the reality of missing out. That's some relief.

National / Media | BIG IN JAPAN Mar 28, 2020

Face masks can foster a false sense of security

What’s happening in Japan is written all over our faces — our blank, expressionless, masked faces. Never before, it seems safe to say, have so many people gone about masked. Thus we confront the microbes that assault us. Are the microbes disconcerted? It seems not. “As self-protection, ...

National Mar 13, 2020

How to keep calm in a pandemic: Education, information and communication

by Magdalena Osumi

Fears over the pandemic can be managed and experts are calling for policymakers to be more transparent to help the public cope with distress.

National / Media | BIG IN JAPAN Jan 25, 2020

Decline of social engagement may betray democracy

by Michael Hoffman

Japan's three leading newspapers, disagreeing on much, agree on this: Japan's democracy is in crisis. "Democratic politics in Japan has become frayed," the Mainichi Shimbun said in an editorial on Jan. 1. "The recent deterioration of Diet deliberations is intolerable," the Yomiuri Shimbun said on Jan. ...

World / Science & Health Jan 23, 2020

Cause of hair turning white 'overnight' found

Marie Antoinette's hair turned white overnight, according to folklore, before she was executed by guillotine in 1793 during the French Revolution. The ill-fated queen embodied an extreme example of the phenomenon of stress-induced graying of the hair. The biological mechanism behind such graying had long ...

Commentary / World Jan 13, 2020

Why implicit bias training doesn't work at companies

by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Perhaps most obviously, every nation has pervasive cultural stereotypes about other nations, usually its neighbors, which play a critical role in shaping and cementing their cultural identity.