Confidence in expressing novel textures - an analysis of Japanese ideophones that describe visually-induced textures

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

Change of Use in Community Services among Disabled Older Adults during COVID-19 in Japan

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

Population-neuroscience study of the Tokyo TEEN Cohort (pn-TTC):Cohort longitudinal study to explore the neurobiological substrates of adolescent psychological and behavioral development.

Adolescence is a crucial stage of psychological development and is critically vulnerable to the onset of psychopathology. However, our understanding of how maturation of endocrine, epigenetics, and brain circuit may underlie the psychological development in adolescence has not been integrated. Here, we introduce our research project, the "population-neuroscience study of the Tokyo TEEN Cohort (pn-TTC)," a longitudinal study to explore the neurobiological substrates of development during adolescence