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To deter the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many countries have imposed a lockdown with restrictions. On 7 April 2020, the Japanese government declared a state of emergency over the COVID-19 outbreak. Japan was in “mild lockdown” which was not enforceable and non-punitive with the declaration. We conducted an online survey to investigate factors associated with psychological distress in the “mild lockdown” under a declared state of emergency for COVID-19. We collected data on 11,333 inhabitants (52.4% women, 46.3 ± 14.6 years) living in the seven prefectures where the declaration was first applied. The investigation dates of this study, 11 and 12 May 2020, were in the final phase of the state of emergency. The survey was conducted in real-time to minimize participants’ recall bias. In addition to psychological inventories often used worldwide, the questionnaires used in this survey included lifestyle and stress management items related to COVID-19 and various socio-demographic items including occupation (e.g. healthcare worker) or income., Measurement(s) Stress • socio-demographic data • psychological distress • loneliness measurement • social network analysis • Lifestyle Technology Type(s) survey method Factor Type(s) sex • age Sample Characteristic - Organism Homo sapiens Sample Characteristic - Environment mild lockdown Sample Characteristic - Location Japan Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: 10.6084/m9.figshare.12996998

The mental and physical effects of repeated lockdowns are unknown. We conducted a longitudinal study of the influence of repeated mild lockdowns during two emergency declarations in Japan, in May 2020 and February 2021. The analyses included 7,893 people who participated in all online surveys. During repeated mild lockdowns, mental and physical symptoms decreased overall, while loneliness increased and social networks decreased. Subgroup analyses revealed that depression and suicidal ideation did not decrease only in the younger age group (aged 18-29) and that younger and middle-aged people (aged 18-49), women, people with a history of treatment for mental illness, and people who were socially disadvantaged in terms of income had higher levels of mental and physical symptoms at all survey times. Additionally, comprehensive extraction of the interaction structure between depression, demographic attributes, and psychosocial variables indicated that loneliness and social networks were most closely associated with depression. These results indicate that repeated lockdowns have cumulative negative effects on interpersonal interaction and loneliness and that susceptible populations, such as young people and those with high levels of loneliness, require special consideration during repetitive lockdown situations.

The current coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has been reported to influence interoceptive sensibility. This study focused on adaptive and maladaptive aspects of interoceptive sensibility and examined how each aspect of interoceptive sensibility affects depression, anxiety, and somatization symptoms under the mild lockdown in Japan, which was not enforceable and a non-punitive lockdown. We used data from 10,672 participants who lived in prefectures where the emergency declaration was first applied in Japan. Interoceptive sensibility was measured by the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). The findings show that Noticing, a subscale of the MAIA, significantly contributed to the worsening of psychological and somatic symptoms (all ps &lt, 0.001). Conversely, Not-Distracting, Not-Worrying, Self-Regulation, and Trusting significantly contributed to the decrease of these symptoms (all ps &lt, 0.05). The findings suggest that two aspects of interoceptive sensibility affected mental health in different ways during the mild lockdown. Mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions would be effective in terms of enhancing adaptive aspects of interoceptive sensibility.

We report on two experiments, published originally in Japanese, on judged goodness and simplicity of dot patterns with reflectional and rotational symmetries (with 1–4 reflection axes and repeats, respectively) under free-viewing tasks. We found that (a) both goodness and simplicity increase monotonously with the number of transformations under which a pattern is invariant; (b) stimulus outlines, such as squares and hexagons, affect both goodness and simplicity; and (c) factors such as contrast polarity and collinearity affect simplicity rather than goodness. The employed free-viewing tasks contrast with detection tasks involving short presentation times, and based on behavioural and neurophysiological evidence, we conclude that this transformational approach captures late rather than early aspects of visio-cognitive processing of visual regularities. ispartof: Acta Psychologica vol:171 pages:128-137 ispartof: location:Netherlands status: published

This study examined the ordinal agreement and order conservation hypotheses of Imai (1986), which predict that a pattern is considered good if it is invariant for more transformations. Undergraduates (N = 144) made goodness ratings for 21-dot compound patterns. The patterns consisted of 8-dot and 13-dot figures with solid and/or open circles. Both the figures and the patterns were invariant under the transformations of rotation and reflection, forming cyclic (C1, C2, C4) or dihedral (D1, D2, D4) groups. The results showed no significant differences among the four combinations of solid and open circles. When the 13-dot C1 figure was overlapped with the 8-dot figures, the C1 compound patterns were rated the poorest. The goodness ratings of the Cn and Dn patterns were the increasing functions of the number of transformations, which supports the ordinal agreement hypothesis. When alternated with the 8-dot D4 figure, the 8-dot C1 figure superimposed with the 13-dot figures reduced the goodness ratings of the C1 patterns, but the order of the ratings was conserved, which supports the order conservation hypothesis.

Backgrounds: The digit symbol substitution test (DSST) is a clinically useful and widely accepted tool for the detection of various psychiatric disorders. Investigating neural activity during the DSST is useful when considering the relationship between the poor performance on the DSST and neurocognitive deficits. However, obtaining reliable functional imaging of the neural mechanisms associated with this test is challenging due to motion artifacts. Aims: To circumvent this problem, we examined frontal lobe activity during the DSST using multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy, a noninvasive functional imaging technique that does not interfere with the DSST procedure. Methods: Twenty-five healthy volunteers were enrolled in this study. Changes in the concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin (oxyHb) during the DSST were determined bilaterally in 52 measurement points (channels) on the frontal area. Results: We found significant increases in oxyHb in more than 70% of the channels, with the intensity of the increase being more pronounced in the left hemisphere. Several channels showed significant positive correlations between changes in oxyHb and DSST performance. Some of the channels with a significant increase in oxyHb during the DSST did not show a correlation with the DSST performance. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that the DSST could prove useful as a frontal lobe stimulating task. Further examinations of DSST/near-infrared spectroscopy analyses of neural mechanisms in patients with psychiatric and neurological diseases are necessary to assess its effectiveness in clinical practice for the evaluation of neuropsychopathology.

Abstract. In order to investigate the effects of color stimuli of the Rorschach inkblot method (RIM), the cerebral activity of 40 participants with no history of neurological or psychiatric illness was scanned while they engaged in the Rorschach task. A scanned image of the ten RIM inkblots was projected onto a screen in the MRI scanner. Cerebral activation in response to five achromatic color cards and five chromatic cards were compared. As a result, a significant increase in brain activity was observed in bilateral visual areas V2 and V3, parietooccipital junctions, pulvinars, right superior temporal gyrus, and left premotor cortex for achromatic color cards (p < .001). For the cards with chromatic color, significant increase in brain activity was observed in left visual area V4 and left orbitofrontal cortex (p < .001). Furthermore, a conjoint analysis revealed various regions were activated in responding to the RIM. The neuropsychological underpinnings of the response process, as described by Acklin and Wu-Holt (1996) , were largely confirmed.