To Save the Planet - Japanese Workers Dress Down

Japanese Environment Ministry, encouraging its employees to dress more causally in-order to help reduce the use of air conditioners and reduce electricity consumption following the March 11 disasters. Environment Minister Ryu Matsumoto has announced a souped-up "Super Cool Biz" campaign this year to relieve the pressure on the electricity grid after the March 11 quake-tsunami and ensuing nuclear emergency.

A fashion show organised by the government in a chilly Tokyo on Wednesday to highlight the campaign caused a stir on the Twitter microblogging site, with mixed reactions to the launch.

"Take a salaryman out of a suit, and he still somehow looks like a salaryman," said illustrator mister_tim.

"Japan launches 'Super Cool Biz' to dress down and save energy at work. People complain it's too cold. Put a bloody jacket on, then," university researcher Kanetaka Maki offered.

When the earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan, the crisis at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant and other power stations triggered a drop in energy output.

Electricity companies have been scheduling power cuts and businesses have been cutting usage by dimming lights and turning off heated toilet seats, as well as installing low-energy bulbs.

Super Cool Biz encourages businesses and government departments to set the dial on air conditioners to 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit).

Employees in the ministry will set an example to corporate Japan by wearing cotton trousers, T-shirts and even loud Aloha shirts.

It is unclear how well the new regime will go down in a country where many are loath to challenge the status quo. In previous years, Cool Biz adherents have taken ties to work in their pockets and sneaked blazers into briefcases.

The prefectural government of disaster-hit Iwate has decided not to go as far as allowing jeans in the office to avoid making visitors feel "uncomfortable", the Kyodo news agency reported.

But the more conservative salarymen will be relieved to hear that the change in sartorial direction does not allow for flip-flops, shorts or vests.

The environment ministry announced results of the first Cool Biz campaign in October 2005, estimating that the campaign resulted in a 460,000-tonne reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to the CO2 emitted by about a million households for one month.

But for Wednesday's launch of this year's Cool Biz campaign the streets of downtown Tokyo's Ginza district have been more remarkable for the number of umbrellas and scarves on show than Hawaiian shirts.

The temperature in Tokyo on Wednesday morning was six degrees below the June 1 average of 21.8 Celsius, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency website.

Source-AFP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Japanese Research: Elders can’t Lie Convincingly Nor can Detect a Liar Easily

Elders can’t lie convincingly nor can detect a liar easily. It all could be due to age-related decline in emotion recognition, new University of Otago research suggests.

Department of Psychology researchers Ted Ruffman, Janice Murray and Jamin Halberstadt compared young and older adults’ skills at deception as judged by listeners within and outside their age group. Dr Murray presented the findings at the Association of Psychological Science’s annual convention in Washington, D.C.

The study involved 60 participants being shown video clips of 20 people expressing their actual or false views on topical issues such as factory farming and stem cell use in humans. Ten of the speakers were aged 30 or under and 10 were 60 or over. Two clips of each speaker were shown; one in which they were lying, and the other being truthful.

The 60 listeners, who consisted of two equal-sized groups with average ages of 21 and 71, were asked to determine if the person in each clip was being truthful or lying. They also underwent tests that required judgments of emotional expression and age in faces.

Associate Professor Halberstadt says the results of the lie detection test showed that both young and older listeners found it easier to differentiate truths and lies when the speaker was an older adult compared to a young adult.

“It could be that older people are less convincing liars because the kinds of cognitive abilities required for successful deceit are also those that tend to deteriorate with age,” he says.

Lying places demands on memory and planning ability (e.g., formulating a plausible argument, keeping story facts straight) and on social understanding (e.g., judging whether a particular argument will convince a listener, as well as keeping track of a listener’s response as the lie unfolds to potentially alter the argument).

“In our study, we also found that older participants in the lie detection test were not as good as their younger counterparts at differentiating between lies and truths.”

Further analysis showed that older people’s scores in the emotion recognition test strongly predicted how well they would do in the lie detection task.

“As with our recent findings on older people’s worse abilities in detecting social gaffes, and also older men’s tendency to talk for too long and go off topic when talking, age-related decline in emotion perception was again linked to a poorer performance in the phenomenon being studied.”

The research team also examined an idea proposed by previous researchers that recognising brief flashes of negative facial emotions such as guilt, fear or disgust, known as “micro-expressions”, plays a key role in detecting lies.

To do this, in the emotion recognition test the team showed participants images of faces displaying one of six different types of emotion, varying the duration of the images on the computer screen. The three durations used were 1/20th of a second, ¼ of a second, or until the participant assigned an emotion to the face.

“While emotion recognition ability explained the difference in lie detection between young and older adults, there was no particular advantage associated with correctly identifying facial emotions displayed for the shorter times. These results suggest that recognising micro-expressions is perhaps not necessarily key to detecting deceitfulness after all,” Associate Professor Halberstadt says.

He says that people who are lying could well be sending out detectable signals with some emotional content, but these may or may not solely revolve around facial expressions, and do not necessarily leak out only briefly.

“Emotion recognition also involves auditory and body-language aspects, so the giveaway signals might additionally, or instead, be heard in the voice or seen in emotions expressed through the body. We still don’t know what exactly allows listeners to correctly detect lies, although we know that people can differentiate lies and truth at a rate above chance level - though they are far from perfect.”

Associate Professor Halberstadt says that it would be interesting to study whether older adults’ difficulties telling and detecting lies affects their susceptibility to fraud schemes and their general social well-being.

“As well as problems arising from being more easily deceived, a reduced ability to tell white lies that spare others’ feelings may impair their relationships, for example.”

The team’s findings are also being published in the US journal Psychology and Aging. Tina Vater, who is now with the University’s Injury Prevention Research Unit, was also a study co-author.

Source-Medindia

 

 

 

 

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