ASUKA KOMIYA

Last Updated :2024/10/01

Affiliations, Positions
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Associate Professor
E-mail
akomiyahiroshima-u.ac.jp

Basic Information

Major Professional Backgrounds

  • 2011/04, 2011/10, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Education,, Research fellow
  • 2011/11, 2013/02, Kobe University, Graduate School of Humanities, Post-doctoral fellow
  • 2013/02, 2014/05, University of Virginia, Department of Psychology, Visiting Scholar
  • 2014/06, 2016/03, Kochi University of Technology, Research Institute of KUT, Post-doctoral fellow
  • 2016/04/01, 2020/03/31, Hiroshima University, Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Associate Professor
  • 2020/04/01, Hiroshima University, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Associate Professor

Educational Backgrounds

  • Kyoto University, Graduate School of Education, Japan, 2006/04, 2011/03
  • Kyoto University, Faculty of Education, Japan, 2002/04, 2006/03

Academic Degrees

  • Kyoto University
  • Kyoto University

In Charge of Primary Major Programs

  • Behavioral Sciences

Research Fields

  • Social sciences;Psychology;Social psychology

Research Keywords

  • Culture, Socio-ecological approach, emotions, regret, decision making

Affiliated Academic Societies

  • The Japanese Society for Social Psychology
  • The Japanese Psychological Association
  • Human Behavior & Evolution Society of Japan
  • Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Educational Activity

Course in Charge

  1. 2024, Liberal Arts Education Program1, 3Term, The Frontiers of Psychology
  2. 2024, Undergraduate Education, Second Semester, Practicum in Behavioral Sciences
  3. 2024, Undergraduate Education, 3Term, Seminar on Original TextsIn Behavioral Science
  4. 2024, Undergraduate Education, Intensive, Advanced Seminar on Original TextsIn Behavioral Science
  5. 2024, Undergraduate Education, 3Term, Social Behavioral Sciences
  6. 2024, Undergraduate Education, Second Semester, Experimental Methods in Psychology C
  7. 2024, Undergraduate Education, Second Semester, Experimental Methods in Psychology D
  8. 2024, Undergraduate Education, Second Semester, Laboratory Work in Psychology C
  9. 2024, Undergraduate Education, Second Semester, Laboratory Work in Psychology D
  10. 2024, Graduate Education (Master's Program) , 3Term, Current Directions in Social Psychology

Research Activities

Academic Papers

  1. Relationship between the number of choices and regret in multiple-choice questions, Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, 40(1), 11-17, 20240731
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  2. Development of abilities to experience, anticipate, and use regret, JAPANESE JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON EMOTIONS, 31(1), 1-11, 20240330
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  3. The Socioecological Psychology of Financial Debts: The Role of Residential Mobility, JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, 55(1), 3-24, 202401
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  4. Money and happiness: the income-happiness correlation is higher when income inequality is higher, PNAS NEXUS, 1(5), 202211
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  5. Relationship Seekers Versus Relationship Selectors: Influence of Residential Mobility on How to Evaluate Others, FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 12, 20220103
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  6. ★, Eects of regret on disaster-related behavior: The case of the 2018 Japan floods, Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, 37(2), 65-75, 202112
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  7. International optimism: Correlates and consequences of dispositional optimism across 61 countries, Journal of Personality, 89(2), 288-304, 202104
  8. Magic Curiosity Arousing Tricks (MagicCATs): A novel stimulus collection to induce epistemic emotions, BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS, 53(1), 188-215, 202102
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  9. The Lure of Counterfactual Curiosity: People Incur a Cost to Experience Regret, PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, 32(2), 241-255, 202102
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  10. Situational experience around the world: A replication and extension in 62 countries, JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, 88(6), 1091-1110, 202012
  11. Residential Mobility Fosters Sensitivity to the Disappearance of Happiness, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY, 55(4), 577-584, 202008
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  12. ★, Socio-Ecological Hypothesis of Reconciliation: Cultural, Individual, and Situational Variations in Willingness to Accept Apology or Compensation, Frontiers in psychology, 20200723
  13. Happiness, Meaning, and Psychological Richness, AFFECTIVE SCIENCE, 1(2), 107-115, 202006
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  14. Shared striatal activity in decisions to satisfy curiosity and hunger at the risk of electric shocks, NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR, 4(5), 531, 202005
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  15. What Makes Employees' Work So Stressful? Effects of Vertical Leadership and Horizontal Management on Employees' Stress, FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 11, 20200319
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  16. Happiness, Meaning, and Psychological Richness, Affective Science, 1, 107-115, 20200623
  17. Happiness around the world: A combined etic-emic approach across 63 countries, PLOS ONE, 15(12), e0242718, 20201209
  18. Gift-giving in romantic couples serves as a commitment signal: Relational mobility is associated with more frequent gift-giving, Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(2), 160-166, 201903
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  19. Cross-Cultural Consistency and Relativity in the Enjoyment of Thinking Versus Doing, JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 117(5), E71-E83, 201911
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  20. Providing compensation promotes forgiveness for replaceable, but not irreplaceable, losses, JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 158(6), 680-693, 2018
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  21. Negotiating with the future: incorporating imaginary future generations into negotiations., Sustainability science, 12(3), 409-420, 2017
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  22. Does a major earthquake change job preferences and human values?, European Journal of Personality, 31(3), 258-265, 20170619
  23. Natural Disasters and Collectivism, Journal of Cross-cultural psychology, 48(8), 1263-1270, 20170901
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  24. ★, The Rural–Urban Difference in Interpersonal Regret, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(4), 513-525, 201604
  25. Implicit cultural self-construals and preference for cooperative and competitive goals with close others, Japanese Journal of social psychology, 32(2), 133-140, 20161130
  26. Residential mobility and low-commitment group, Archives of Scientific Psychology, 3(1), 54-61, 2015
    Link to Paper Search Results by DOI
  27. An individual difference in betrayal aversion: Prosociality predicts more risky choices in social but not natural domains, Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 6(1), 5-8, 2015
  28. Seeking help from close, same-sex friends: Relational costs for Japanese and personal costs for European Canadians, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 32(4), 529-554, 2015
  29. Shame-prone poeple are more likely to punish themselves: A test of the reputation-maintenance explanation for self-punishment, Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 9(1), 1-7, 2015
  30. Trust, cohesion, and cooperation after early vs. late trust violations in two-person exchange: The role of generalized trust in the U.S. and Japan, Social Psychology Quarterly, 77(4), 344-360, 2014
  31. Social ecology and theory of mind, Psychologia: An international journal of psychological sciences, 57(2), 133-151, 2014
  32. Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) polymorphism and slef-punishment after and unintentional transgression, Personality and Individual Differences, 69, 182-186, 2014
  33. ★, Cultural diffeeences in the action effect, Social Cognition, 31(5), 562-577, 2013
  34. The effefcts of infants' and adults' face expressions on approach-avoidance behavior, Psychologia: An international journal of psychological sciences, 56(1), 33-44, 2013
  35. Effects of expressing interpersonal regret on a perceiver's trust behaviors, Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, 28(2), 111-117, 2013
  36. Age differences in the experiene of regret in Japan: Comission versus omission in the interpersonal and self domains, Psychologia: An international journal of psychological sciences, 55(3), 171-183, 2012
  37. Is it possible to compare happiness across cultures?, Japanese Psychological Review, 55(1), 6-21, 2012
  38. Cultural adaptation of visual attention: calibration of the oculomotor control system in accordance with cultural scenes., PloS one, 7(11), 2012
  39. ★, Cultural grounding of regret: Regret in self and interpersonal contexts, Cognition & Emotion, 25(6), 1121-1130, 2011
  40. Effects of facial expression and linguistic information on judgments of trustworthiness, Japanese Journal of Social Psychology, 26(1), 65-72, 2010
  41. ★, The mechanism of social adaptation through experiencing regret: function of interpesonal-harm regret, Japanese Psychological Review, 53(2), 153-168, 2010
  42. ★, Regret in individual and group decision making, Shinrigaku-kenkyu, 78(2), 165-172, 2007

Publications such as books

  1. 2015, The Psychology of Desire, Desires and Happiness: Aristotelianm Puritanm and Buddhist Approaches, Guilford Press, 2015, Scholarly Book, Joint work, English, Oishi, S., Westgate, E. Tucker, J., & Komiya, A., 474, 286-306
  2. 2007/08, Affective Science, Emotions and Group behaviors - from a perspective of social adaptation, Kyoto University Press, 2007, 8, Scholarly Book, Joint work, 日本語, Watabe, M. & Komiya, A., 237-257

Invited Lecture, Oral Presentation, Poster Presentation

  1. The seductive power of curiosity: When it overrides physical risk – an fMRI investigation, Johnny King, Lau, Hiroki Ozono, Asuka Komiya, Kou Murayama, Organization for Human Brain Mapping, 2017/06/27, Without Invitation, English, Vancouver, Why did Pandora open the box, even though she had been warned not to? – Because she could not resist the power of curiosity. Curiosity can be conceptualized as the feeling that creates a strongly-felt volitional desire for new knowledge to resolve gaps in it[1]. As a fundamental part of human motivation, curiosity supports an enormous variety of intellectual behaviours, for example scientific discovery. A meta-analysis revealed that curiosity predicts academic performance above and beyond intelligence[2], corroborating findings that it facilitates long-term consolidation of learning[3]. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to one of the most essential nature of curiosity: its seductive power to influence behaviours. Also, to date only a few neuroimaging studies have examined the neural correlates of curiosity[3-5]. They have implicated the reward-system in the brain[3-4], which is commonly activated by extrinsic incentives. This study examined how curiosity biases our decision-making, even in the face of physical risk (e.g. expecting electric stimulation), and evaluated the relevant underlying neural mechanisms using fMRI. To induce curiosity, we have created and pilot-tested a set of videos of magic tricks performed by professional magicians. A magic trick shows an event that is apparently impossible, thus an ideal material to create strong knowledge gap.
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  2. When the seductive power of curiosity overrides prospective risk- the underlying neural mechanism, Johnny King, Lau, Kei Kuratomi, Hiroki Ozono, Asuka Komiya, Kou Murayama, the 13th International conference for cognitive neuroscience, 2017/08/06, Without Invitation, English, Amsterdam, Why would Pandora open the box, even after she was warned? This study examined how curiosity biases decision-making, even in the face of physical risk (e.g. expecting electric stimulation), and evaluated the relevant underlying neural mechanisms using fMRI. To induce curiosity, we pilot-tested a set of videos of magic tricks performed by professional magicians. A magic trick shows an event that appears impossible, thus an ideal material to create strong knowledge gap as a source of curiosity. Thirty-one healthy, right-handed participants (5 male; age: 18-30yos) were presented with magic trick videos (n=36) and images of food in a 3T Siemens scanner. In every trial, after the presentation of a fixation and a video, participants were asked to rate how curious they were to know the solution. Then, they were shown a wheel of fortune representing a lottery which visualized the probability of winning (and losing), and were asked to decide whether to gamble. If they gambled and won, they were provided with a ticket to see the solution. They were instructed that if they lost, they would receive a mild electric shock after the experiment. Participants could also opt to skip the lottery. Prior to the fMRI experiment, we evaluated the paradigm with a separate participant group. Behavioural data were fitted into a generalised linear mixed-effects model, which showed that increased probability of expecting a reward, as well as curiosity, increased individual’s tendency to take risk (corroborating past findings). Neuroimaging analysis (using SPM12) compared the BOLD signals of the ‘accepted’ and ‘rejected’ trials at the time of decision making. In particular, the accepted (versus rejected) magic trials were associated with greater striatal activity, commonly regarded as part of the brain’s reward system.
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  3. Making Use of Regret Increases the Number of One's Friends, Asuka Komiya, Ai Mizokawa, Takayuki Goto, 18th general meeting of the European association of social psychology, 2017/07/06, Without Invitation, English, Granada, Spain, The study objective was to determine whether individual tendencies to experience, anticipate, and make use of regret influence social adaptation. It has been argued that regret has a functional value as owing to the associated pain, it leads to better decision-making, causing people to avoid similar failure in the future. While it has been demonstrated in many studies that regret improves what to do with the experimental tasks or academic performance in intrapersonal situations, how it functions in interpersonal situations has not been explored very often. The focus of the current study was on how individual differences regarding anticipation, and making use of and experiencing regret, contribute to social adaptation, such as the ability to make friends. Respondents read a vignette which described a situation whereby they drew a lot (one of two) and received second prize. They were then immediately told that the unchosen lot was the winning prize. Respondents had to rate their feelings before and after they knew that they had had a chance of winning but had lost the first prize (i.e., the tendency to anticipate and experience regret). After completing the rating exercise, they had to indicate which lot they would like to choose the future (i.e., the tendency of making use of regret). They then reported the number of their friends. It was found that experiencing regret correlated negatively, and making use of regret correlated positively, with the number of friends reported. This relationship remained significant, even after controlling for age and sex.
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  4. Regret facilitates learning: A card game experiment, Asuka Komiya, Takayuki Goto, Toshiyuki Himichi, Kou Murayama, Michiko Sakaki, International Congress of Psychology, 2016/07/29, Without Invitation, English, Yokohama, Japan, Researchers have argued that regret promotes appropriate behavior by embodying painful lessons of past failure. In the present study, we developed a new paradigm to investigate the learning effect of regret, controlling for the feedback information. In the task, participants chose a card between two decks, obtained the point written on it, and tried to maximize their accumulated points. In the regret condition, in addition to the point they obtained, participants were shown a point they could have obtained if they had chosen a card from the other deck. In the non-regret condition, participants were given a point associated with another card that was not used in the trial. The results showed that as trials passed, participants in the regret condition were more likely to choose a card from the more rewarding deck than were those in the non-regret condition. The usefulness of the task has been discussed.
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  5. Does interpersonal regret facilitate learning? : A card game experiment, Asuka Komiya, Takayuki Goto, Toshiyuki Himichi, Kou Murayama, Michiko Sakaki, Annual meeting of Japanese society of social psychology, 2016/09/18, Without Invitation, Japanese
  6. COULDA SHOULDA WOULDA: PEOPLE PAY FOR INFORMATION TO EXPERIENCE REGRET, Lily Fitzgibbon, Asuka Komiya, Kou Murayama, Lily Fitzgibbon, Asuka Komiya, Kou Murayama, the 2018 SAS Annual Conference, 2018/04/28, Without Invitation, English, Society for Affective Science, UCLA Luskin Conference Center Los Angeles, California
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Awards

  1. 2006, Encouraging Prize for Young Researchers, The Japanese Society for Social Psychology

Social Activities

History as Peer Reviews of Academic Papers

  1. 2016, Japanese psychological research, Others, Reviewer, 1
  2. 2017, International Journal of Psychology, Others, Reviewer, 1
  3. 2017, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Others, Reviewer, 1