Koji Komatsu

Our life is full of invisibility that exerts power on our acts, relationships, and construction of the self. This paper discusses psychological processes in which invisibility plays an essential role, and constructs a typology of invisibility in society and in our lives. After a brief look at the crucial role of invisibility in prevailing theories of psychology, I first show how invisibility works in children's meaning constructions, the process in which their selves become clear for observers (the presentational self, Komatsu 2010). The development of children's meaning making is led by different types of invisibility concerning the children themselves. Second, I extend the discussion from the development of individuals to the role of socially regulated invisibility that controls our acts and relationships with others, introducing examples concerning religious belief in history. After these discussions, I present a hierarchical classification of invisibility from a simple spatial-temporal separation of concretely existing objects and ourselves to an abstract aspect of invisibility in which the object and its meaning are unclear.

Although our environments and ourselves are usually thought about as relatively stable over time, there is always a tension between sameness and non-sameness in our lives. Because any development is considered as emerging non-sameness, I report that the inquiry into the development of human mind must regard this tension as essential. In this paper, first I show that this tension is a highly relational and dynamic phenomenon that cannot be fixed or measured in numerical terms. Non-sameness is not only a result of development but also a ground that leads to further development in the future. After illustrating the function and regulation of the {same <> non-same} tension in development by analyzing an excerpt from a mother-child conversation, I explain that this tension, or more generally the dialectic nature, is within the core of psychological phenomena, in terms that were introduced to psychology by James Mark Baldwin a century ago. These discussions imply the importance of inquiring into the process of development that emerges from the dialectic tension and fluctuations of our movements and that is observable in various relationships, including the relationship between researchers and study participants.

The present study inquired into elementary school 4th graders' personal stories as told in diaries that they had written as a homework assignment, focusing on the children's selves in relation to others described in the stories and the reader of the diaries. On the basis of the children's style of writing and answers to a questionnaire asking the children about their beliefs about diary writing, diaries of 3 fourth-grade students (1 boy, 2 girls) were selected. Out of 537 diary entries written by these 3 students over 12 months, mainly describing their experiences in their homes and neighborhoods, 14 were chosen for analysis. A qualitative analysis suggested how others work to clarify children's selves in several types of expression that make the perspective of the child writing the diary more distinctive. These expressions included the children focusing on fine details of their experiences, describing conversations or their inner reflections in direct speech style, and criticizing others. The discussion deals with how these writings clarify the children's positions to their teacher who will read their diaries.

ショートレポート論文

Based on the recently developed Gitaigo personality scale (Komatsu, Sakai, Nishioka, &amp Mukoyama, 2012), we investigated the relationship between perceived personality and leading/following roles in close friend dyads. Primary participants rated their own and one of their close friend's personality with Gitaigo personality scale. They also described who takes the role of leader in the relationship with the friend they rated. When one in the pair is reported as leader, the other is considered as follower. Subsidiary participants who were cited as close friends rated their own personality. Our analysis of the 215 pairs showed that the participants taking the role of follower were rated higher in the traits of Cowardliness and Mildness by the primary participants. Regarding Mildness, this tendency was also clear in subsidiary participants' self-ratings. Primary participants rated the Preciseness and Candidness of their friends lower if their friend was considered a follower. Gitaigo personality scale describes the perceived personality well, at least for several traits.

In this study, I will elaborate and extend the theoretical framework of the presentational self (Komatsu, Human Development 53:208-228, 2010) that finds the self in two aspects of our interaction with others or objects. From this perspective, the self is not an internal entity, a representation that can be revealed voluntarily when directly queried by researchers (e.g., through items of a questionnaire or an interview), but is what emerges from constantly relating with the immediate environment. The process structure of being in the environment that emerges in this relationship is the presentational self, which both an external observer and the person him/herself can detect but not necessarily describe in words. For further elaboration, first, I clarify that the triangular relationship between a study participant, others or objects, and observing researchers, which is essential in the presentational self, is also common in the methodological presuppositions of existing psychological studies on the self. Second, I apply the framework to a daily activity of oral storytelling in a Japanese elementary school, where the emergence of children's self is observable through sequences of organized interactions with others. From these discussions, I demonstrate both the theoretical and practical importance of considering the self to refer to the relationships that we constantly create in our daily life.

Gitaigo is a subtype of mimetic words (onomatopoeia) in the Japanese language, which can be regarded as words that imitate actions or states. This study develops a personality scale, with six subscales, using 60 gitaigo words as items for rating the personality of the self and others. We asked 1 054 participants to rate their own personality and 905 participants to rate a close friend's personality, using 158 gitaigo words as items to describe personality. We found that a six-factor model, found in our previous study, was also applicable to the present study of ratings of participants' own personality. We also found six groups of words in the ratings of close friends' personality, although the factor structure is slightly different from the selfrating factors. We selected ten words that exhibited high loadings for each of the six factors to develop a personality scale with six subscales showing high reliability. We named those factors: Cowardliness, Slowness, Preciseness, Irritableness, Candidness, and Frivolousness. The average scores for self-ratings were significantly lower for two subscales (Preciseness and Candidness) and higher for other four subscales compared to the rating of others.

In this article, I take a relational and discursive perspective on young children's self observed in daily natural conversations, and consider the process of semiotic mediation in the observer's recognition. Based on the ideas of co-construction of relationships and identities in conversation, and using excerpts of dialogues between a young child and her mother that deal with the child's experiences at daycare center (hoikuen in Japan) recorded during their car rides, I present how the self of young children in relation to others appears to observers. I regard this genre of self - 'presentational self' - as a kind of Gestalt quality appearing in the act of positioning and in the configuration of the child and others presented through the conversation. As a basis of this process, I will discuss the semiotically mediated process of differentiation in 2 aspects of the conversation: first, in the process of conversation when the children and the partners make further extensions of what is shared, and second, in the array of self and others as exposed in the conversation. Copyright (C) 2010 S. Karger AG, Basel

In this study, natural conversations between a young girl and her mother were recorded in a car over a 17-month period (from ages 4:4 to 5:8), mainly when they were driving home from nursery school. Analysis of the recordings (34 hours over 153 days) focused on conversations that depicted the girl in relation to her nursery school friends. In 50 episodes concerning her interpersonal experiences at the nursery school, the girl frequently compared or enumerated her friends and herself, using several criteria such as their abilities or their roles in pretend play. In the early portions of the recordings, only simple comparisons and enumeration were observed. But later in the tapings, several narratives or explanations concerning the characteristics of the enumerated person were skillfully inserted into the enumeration. Whereas the mother directly supported her child's expressions in the early part of the research period, her role gradually changed, and the communication became increasingly mutual and collaborative.