The Effects of Social Interaction and Personal Relationships on Facial Expressions

Previous studies have reported that the expression of smiles is facilitated by social interaction between partners. We examined the effects of social interaction and personal relationships on facial expressions in Japan. Pairs of friends and strangers seated next to each other (the no partition condition) or separated by a partition (the partition condition) were shown film clips aimed to elicit either positive or negative affect. Smiles were facilitated in the no partition condition in which participants interacted with each other. Further, the effect of social interaction on frowns differed depending on whether pairs were friends or strangers.     

Crossing Boundaries: Legality and the Power of the State in Unauthorized Migration

Unauthorized migrants, often referred to as 'illegal aliens' or 'undocumented immigrants', are a burning political issue in many countries. This paper examines the complexities of unauthorized migration and addresses competing viewpoints on the subject as it relates to the power of the state. Despite the popular image of unauthorized migration as secret border crossing, migrants become 'illegal' in various ways, and the boundary between 'legal' and 'illegal' is more fluid than it may appear to be. Unauthorized migration is conventionally understood as evidence of the limited power of the state over immigration. This view, however, too narrowly focuses on the power of the state over entries of migrants. If we broaden our perspective and examine its power over migrants' lives and the way in which they are integrated into society, unauthorized migration in fact reveals the strong power of the state, which has a capacity to deprive migrants of their rights.     

Contemporary Social Problems in Japan: A Study of the Suicide and Depopulation Problems

Abstract  Two complementary investigations were undertaken:
1. Research into the relationship between suicide and depopulation in Shimane Prefecture.
2. Research into the relationship between the perception of social problems and unwanted objective conditions, employing suicide as the example of unwanted conditions.
To summarize the most important findings:
1. The suicide rates have been notably higher in depopulated areas.
2. The partial correlation of suicide to depopulation was high, when the effect of aging of population was removed.
3. This partial correlation has increased since 1975. There has been an aggravation of the problem of suicide as a depopulation problem.
4. The correlation of suicide to aging of the population vanished, when the effect of depopulation was removed.
5. At 70 and over, the suicide rates have been notably higher in depopulated areas.
6. The correlation of the age-specific suicide rate with the depopulation rate, increases with age and the correlation of the suicide rate among old people to the depopulation rate, was notably higher.
7. These suicidal tendencies express the mores of society. Morality underlies the perception of social problems, while morality could not exist without generating suicide at a certain point. Both suicide and the perception of suicide as social problems are largely determined by morality. This is our paradoxical hypothesis.
8. Lastly, we emphasize that there are serious depopulation problems in Japan. This is particularly obvious, if suicide is employed as the indicator of depopulation severity.     

Partition of a query set into minimal number of subsets having consecutive retrieval property

This paper is concerned with information retrieval. The basic problem is how to store large masses of data in such a way that whenever information regarding some particular aspect of the data is needed, such information is easily and efficiently retrieved. Work in this field is thus very important for organizations dealing with large classes of data.The consecutive retrieval (C-R) property defined by S.P. Ghosh is an important relation between a set of queries and a set of records. Its existence enables the design of information retrieval system with a minimal search time and no redundant storage in that the records can be organized in such a way that those pertinent to any query are stored in consecutive storage locations. The C-R property, however, can not exist between every arbitrary query set and every record set.A subset of the query set Q having the C-R property is called a C-R subset and a C-R subset having the maximum cardinality is called the maximal C-R subset. A partition of Q is called the C-R partition if every subset has the C-R property. A C-R partition with minimum number of subsets is called the minimal C-R partition. With respect to the set of all binary queries and the set of all binary records, it is shown that the maximal cardinality of a C-R subset is 2l-1 where l is the number of attributes concerned. A combinatorial characterization of a maximal C-R subset is also given. A lower bound on the number of subsets in a C-R partition and several examples which attain the lower bound are given. A general procedure for obtaining a minimal C-R partition which attains the lower bound is given provided the number of attributes is even.     

A modified confidence set for the structural break date in linear regression models

Elliott and Müller (EM) (2007 Elliott, G., Müller, U. K. (2007). Confidence sets for the date of a single break in linear time series regressions. Journal of Econometrics 141:1196–1218.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) provide a method for constructing a confidence set for the structural break date by inverting a variant of the locally best test statistic. Previous studies have shown that the EM method produces a set with an accurate coverage ratio even for a small break; however, the set is often overly lengthy. This study proposes a simple modification to rehabilitate their method through the long-run variance estimation. Following the literature, we provide an asymptotic justification for the improvement of the modified method over the original method under a nonlocal asymptotic framework. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that the modified method achieves a shorter confidence set than the EM method, especially when the break is large or the HAC correction is conducted. The modified method may exhibit minor errors in the coverage rate when the break is small; however, the coverage is more stable than alternative methods when the break is large. We apply our method to a level shift in post-1980s Japanese inflation data.     

Difference in Eye Gaze for Floor Apportionment in Native- and Second-Language Conversations

In face-to-face communication, eye gaze is known to play various roles such as managing the attention of interlocutors, expressing intimacy, exercising social control, highlighting particular speech content, and coordinating floor apportionment. For second language (L2) communication, one’s perception of eye gaze is expected to have more importance than for native language (L1) because eye gaze is assumed to partially compensate for the deficiencies of verbal expressions. This paper examines and clarifies the efficiency of the function of eye gaze in the coordination of floor apportionment through quantitative analyses of eye gaze during three-party conversations in L1 and L2. Specifically, the authors conducted ANOVA tests on the eye-gaze statistics of a speaker and two listeners during utterances while focusing on whether floor-switch occurs subsequent to the utterance. The analysis results show that the listener who is gazed at more by the speaker is more likely to be the next speaker with a higher probability in L2 than in L1 conversations. Meanwhile, the listeners gaze more at the speaker in L2 than in L1 conversation for both the utterances just before a floor switch and cases with no floor switch. These results support the observation that the eye gaze of the speaker is efficient for floor apportionment in L2 conversations and suggest that longer listeners’ eye gazes in L2 conversations also function efficiently in smooth floor apportionment.     

Double linear diagonals-parameter symmetry and decomposition of double symmetry for square tables

For square contingency tables with ordered category, the present paper proposes the double linear diagonals-parameter symmetry (D-LDPS) model which implies the structure of both asymmetry with respect to the main diagonal and with respect to the reverse diagonal in the table. The D-LDPS model may be appropriate for a square ordinal table if it is reasonable to assume an underlying bivariate normal distribution with equal marginal variances. The present paper also gives the orthogonal decomposition of the double symmetry model into the D-LDPS model and the double marginal mean equality model. An example is given.     

An exact test for comparing two predictive values in small‐size clinical trials

Positive and negative predictive values describe the performance of a diagnostic test. There are several methods to test the equality of predictive values in paired designs. However, these methods were premised on large sample theory, and they may not be suitable for small‐size clinical trials because of inflation of the type 1 error rate. In this study, we propose an exact test to control the type 1 error rate strictly for conducting a small‐size clinical trial that investigates the equality of predictive values in paired designs. In addition, we execute simulation studies to evaluate the performance of the proposed exact test and existing methods in small‐size clinical trials. The proposed test can calculate the exact P value, and as a result of simulations, the empirical type 1 error rate for the proposed test did not exceed the significance level regardless of the setting, and the empirical power for the proposed test is not much different from the other methods based on large‐sample theory. Therefore, it is considered that the proposed exact test is useful when the type 1 error rate needs to be controlled strictly.