Background: Warfare has long impeded vaccination programs in polio-endemic Afghanistan. We aimed to describe progress in access to children under 5, oral polio vaccine (OPV) coverage among children under 5 in nationwide polio campaigns, and polio surveillance performance indicators after the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed to Taliban forces in August 2021.
Methods: Trends in the number of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) and circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) cases and surveillance indicators from 2015 to 2023, and trends in the OPV coverage in the November 2020-June 2022 polio campaigns, were described.
We aimed to identify the ways in which coloring cells affected decision-making in the context of binary-colored multi-attribute tables, using eye movement data. In our black-white attribute tables, the value of attributes was limited to two (with a certain threshold for each attribute) and each cell of the table was colored either black or white on the white background. We compared the two natural ways of systematic color assignment: "quantitatively coherent" ways and "qualitatively coherent" ways (namely, the ways in which the black-white distinction represented the quantitative amount distinction, and the ways in which the black-white distinction represented the quality distinction).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA probability weighting function (w(p)) is considered to be a nonlinear function of probability (p) in behavioral decision theory. This study proposes a psychophysical model of probability weighting functions derived from a hyperbolic time discounting model and a geometric distribution. The aim of the study is to show probability weighting functions from the point of view of waiting time for a decision maker.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred on 11 March 2011, which caused the leakage of radioactive materials into the environment. In this study, we report public concerns about radiation in Fukushima and Tokyo almost one year after the nuclear disaster. We examined the public concerns by analyzing the data from 1022 participants, 555 in Fukushima and 467 in Tokyo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Patients with schizophrenia and their families have suffered greatly from stigmatizing effects. Although many efforts have been made to eradicate both prejudice and stigma, they still prevail even among medical professionals, and little is known about how contact with schizophrenia patients affects their attitudes towards schizophrenia.
Methods: We assessed the impact of the renaming of the Japanese term for schizophrenia on clinical residents and also evaluated the influence of contact with schizophrenia patients on attitudes toward schizophrenia by comparing the attitudes toward schizophrenia before and after a one-month clinical training period in psychiatry.
Shinrigaku Kenkyu
February 2012
This paper examines consumers' preferences for competing brands by using a preference model of verbal protocols. Participants were 150 university students, who reported their opinions and feelings about McDonalds and Mos Burger (competing hamburger restaurants in Japan). Their verbal protocols were analyzed by using the singular value decomposition method, and the latent decision frames were estimated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow does one deal with unfair behaviors? This subject has long been investigated by various disciplines including philosophy, psychology, economics, and biology. However, our reactions to unfairness differ from one individual to another. Experimental economics studies using the ultimatum game (UG), in which players must decide whether to accept or reject fair or unfair offers, have also shown that there are substantial individual differences in reaction to unfairness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper presents a new model of category judgment. The model hypothesizes that, when more attention is focused on a category, the psychological range of the category gets narrower (category-focusing hypothesis). We explain this hypothesis by using the metaphor of a "mental-box" model: the more attention that is focused on a mental box (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMisestimating risk could lead to disadvantaged choices such as initiation of drug use (or gambling) and transition to regular drug use (or gambling). Although the normative theory in decision-making under risks assumes that people typically take the probability-weighted expectation over possible utilities, experimental studies of choices among risks suggest that outcome probabilities are transformed nonlinearly into subjective decision weights by a nonlinear weighting function that overweights low probabilities and underweights high probabilities. Recent studies have revealed the neurocognitive mechanism of decision-making under risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOur objectives were to investigate: (1) relationships between perceptions of various terms regarding mutation and the depth of knowledge regarding mutation among family members of patients receiving genetic outpatient services, and (2) differences in perceptions of the term "gene mutation" for family members versus university students. Fifty-eight family members and 178 university students responded to two questionnaires: Impressions regarding the term, and Knowledge about the concept of mutation. Factor analyses were conducted to determine the factor structure of ratings of the terms, and two-way analyses of variance [(1)Term, (2)Group x Knowledge] were conducted to examine differences in perceptions of the terms as measured by scores for each extracted factor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe old term for schizophrenia, "Seishin-Bunretsu-Byo" (Mind-Split Disease), has been replaced by "Togo-Shitcho-Sho" (Integration Disorder) in Japan. Stigma research requiring individuals to report personal beliefs is useful but is subject to social desirability bias. Using the Implicit Association Test, a measurement designed to minimize this bias, we assessed the impact of this renaming on the stereotype of schizophrenia held by a younger generation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study developed a Japanese version of the "Regret and Maximization Scale" in decision making, which was originally constructed by Schwartz, Ward, Monterosso, Lyubomirsky, White, and Lehman (2002). This scale measures assess the tendency to experience regret, and individual differences in the desire to maximize or to satisfy. In Study 1, the original version of the "Regret and Maximization Scale" was translated into Japanese and administered to 307 Japanese university students responded the scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPercept Mot Skills
August 2005
We examined a psychometric function of price judgment, comparing the mental ruler model, which predicted inverted S-shaped psychometric function, with a power function. Subjects, 102 citizens living in Japan, were asked to rate satisfaction with specified discounted prices. Analysis indicated that predictions of the mental ruler model gave a better fit than those of the power function.
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