Professor
Yu NIIYA
What is happiness and how can we achieve it? Who benefits from helping--the helper or the recipient of help? What factors encourage people to offer help when help is not requested? In this seminar, students co-create a class in which they learn about the self and culture by reading and discussing current research on selected topics in social and cultural psychology. Students learn how to recognize the costs and benefits of ego mechanisms, how to create happiness for themselves and others, how to build and maintain functional relationships, and how to shift from reacting to creating. By conducting experimental or survey research on a topic of their choice, students learn how to identify important problems, propose solutions, obtain data to check the validity of their propositions, and communicate their findings with others.
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Seminar activities
Students’ Theses
- Subtitling Empathy: Enhancing Empathy Through Movie Subtitles
- Dressed for Success: The Art of Compliments, Self-Esteem, and Unleashing Creativity
- The Unconscious Power of Superheroes Poses
- Why am I not tagged? Self-image Goals Shape Reactions to Rejection in Socia Media
- Trained Mentality: Increasing Sports Performance through Mindfulness-based Intervention
- Encouragement of Need for Uniqueness and Self-positivity
- Are people from collectivist cultures less likely to get positive effects on their well-being from receiving help?
- Does self-compassion increase compassion toward others?
- What kind of feedback motivates people to overcome challenges?
- Do mastery goals increase learning from failure more than performance goals?
- Does self-enhancement increase well-being among the Japanese too?
- What kind of self-disclosure promotes interpersonal relationships?
- Is there a gender difference in how acceptable amae is?
- Does holding a hot pack influence one's evaluation of a person as warm and kind?
- The influence of thank you messages and thank you gifts on prosocial behavior
- Does relatedness increase happiness more so than competence in Japan?
- Is time an individual property? Concept of zero-sum time perspective and its relation with self-image goals