I gave a presentation at the 63rd Annual Conference of the Japanese Society of Social Psychology held at Kyoto Tachibana University from September 14 to 15 2022. Since 2020, as COVID-19 had spread widely, we didn’t have any chance to see each other face to face at academic meetings. This year I could finally meet old colleagues in-person, and I felt the enthusiasm that I couldn’t have at an online conference. Online conferences have the advantages that I can attend even from a distance and review on-demand presentations repeatedly. However, the content of the online presentation will not remain in my memory. At a physical presentation, since all the information including my emotions and the context there are processed together with the voices and facial expressions of the speaker, I can clearly remember what was presented. I hope that there will be more opportunity for face- to-face meetings going forward.

I gave a presentation of my study as a CRET researcher, titled "Examination of Interpersonal Situation Japanese Undergraduate Students Feel Uncomfortable - through Quantitative Text Analysis" on Sept 15. As this was a qualitative study that is　uncommon at this conference, I didn’t expect many listeners to come. However, contrary to my thought, quite a few people came to see my presentation without any break, which made me realize that many people would be interested in the theme of my study.

 The outline of my presentation is as follows. I’m working on a project to develop the social skills (interpersonal and communication) of Japanese graduate students by using educational VR videos. To start with, we should clarify the situation where students these days have problems. Although we can refer to previous researches on a similar framework, we can’t find the characteristics of modern students in general since some are for 20 years ago, or based only on students from a particular area. Moreover, some recent studies suggest that along with the spread of COVID-19, communication among modern people has changed dramatically. Considering these matters, I realized that there is a need to clarify the interpersonal situation that current graduate students feel uncomfortable and conducted an online survey of graduate students across Japan.

By analyzing the data from the students asked to write freely, we found that they felt difficulty communicating in wide range of contexts. The situations particularly described frequently are those where they work as a group for a class assignment, where they must turn down invitations for a drink from seniors at club activities, where they must ask for the change of working hours at part-time job, where they see family fighting, and where they communicate with someone they met on the Internet. Especially, the last one is a typical situation of this day and age, where people meet each other on the Internet and communicate before they disclose themselves. I believe this situation should be part of our educational content for skills training in the future.

People came to my poster presentation provided valuable and generally positive feedback. Especially, many people expressed their expectation for our creation of VR content. The roll playing method used in conventional skills training is criticized for not being realistic. Even though we may try to make it real, students still feel compelled. On the other hand, VR can give students a sense of immersion and reality. This suggests that VR has a high educational effect in skills training. Additionally, I received a valid comment that I should examine how students feel about “input” situations such as getting information, since the situations extracted in my study were mainly “output”, such as asserting, transmitting and expressing one’s feelings. This kind of comment helped us to gain a new perspective that we didn’t have. The regular release of our study to the public can be a good opportunity to get useful feedback from points of view other than those of our research team.

This convention was a kind of a reunion as we met face to face after several years. I would like to have those opportunities in the future to pursue the latest findings in psychology as well as make presentations about my own study.

Examination of Interpersonal Situation Japanese Undergraduate Students Feel Uncomfortable-through Quantitative Text Analysis
Takafumi Sawaumi, Tsutomu Inagaki, Ayaka Sumigawa）

（Takafumi Sawaumi, CRET Researcher）