Our aim was to grasp how people think and behave when they encounter some situation in which they find it too difficult to solve their problem, such as sudden mechanical troubles and to understand how and why they get stuck in the situation. In this study we used some quiz-like tasks called “insight problem.” To solve the problem, a radical restructuring of the initial idea is required. Here we report the results of our preliminary experiment.

When an incident occurs in the workplace, it is important to disseminate the information within the company to prevent the recurrence of similar events. In this study, our aim was to establish what measures should be taken when providing this information to increase the likelihood that workers will identify potential risk factors in the workplace.
In the field of memory research, the “self-reference effect” is well known. It refers to the phenomenon whereby the memory of the object the person memorizes in connection with themselves would keep better.
In this study, we carried out an experiment to examine this effect in conditions close to reality, assuming a situation in which risk information is provided.

Workplace accidents and mistakes can happen when workers cannot express what they should or want to say because they cannot discuss critical problems under these circumstances.
We conducted this study to prevent hazardous workplace incidents caused by workers not expressing their opinions in the workplace. Previously we conducted some investigations to better understand how “the degree workers are willing to express their opinion” and “psychological safety” affects “safety behavior”. However, in those studies we selected the participants randomly from ordinary workers, which made it impossible to control for such variables as specific workplace or workplace organization in our analysis. Thus, this time we carried out a survey of workers belonging to specific and identified engineering workplaces and analyzed the data by workplaces as well as individuals. Here, psychological safety means “the belief of workers that their team will be safe when taking interpersonal risks” and that they have an atmosphere where they can talk freely about their concerns that are challenging to express. It is said that in a workplace with high psychological safety workers tend to have low interpersonal anxiety and proactively express their ideas, doubts, and concerns.

Workstyles have dramatically changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes include the spread of teleworking and online tool use, which have significantly affected the methods and the quality of workplace communication. These changes might affect human relationship in the workplace and work efficiency. Thus, in this study we conducted a survey research in order to grasp how people were actually teleworking. The study was conducted at the point two years after they were forced to start teleworking because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We then examined how workers perceived the impact of changes in communication on workplace relationships and work efficiency.
We also clarified the relationship between differences between how they perceived the impact and how they were actually teleworking. Here we report some of findings obtained through the survey.

Work Engagement (WE) is defined as “the positive and fulfilling work-related mental condition characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.” It’s said that employees with high WE are positively involved in their work, that WE increases when workers have appropriate job resources, such as job discretion or support from managers and coworkers. It has also been shown that job performance improves when WE increases.
As in the previous study we conducted this survey to test the hypothetical model in which job resources lead to WE, which in tern leads to safe behavior and safety awareness.
In addition, in this study we set up and tested an additional model in which we replaced some independent variables according to the hypothesis that job resources includes "psychological safety“. "psychological safety” refers to the atmosphere in which people are willing to express their opinions without taking interpersonal risk.
Employees working at Company A, a railroad company, participated in our survey.