Affective Laboratory

Various, in short.

We welcome diverse people with broad ranges of background, culture, value system, way of thinking, and dream.

We welcome women as well as men, international students as well as Japanese, older as well as younger.

We know that, in order to think about human, insights from various viewpoints are significant advantage.

However, while we emphasize diversity, we are not a chaos.

Our laboratory is not the place where different kinds of people are doing their own business in their own ways completely freely and do not care about others.

Diversity in an organization requires certain costs. If members are doing completely freely, the cost to maintain the organization will be enormous and well exceed the advantage we can take from diversity.

While we emphasize diversity, we need people who are happy to share our common missions, common goals, and respect cultures of each other.

Yes. And we have actually done that.

The people who have ever joined us are from various majors, including psychology, mechanical engineering, computer science, polymer chemistry, as well as industrial engineering.

Those people are from various departments in various universities in various countries: China, Ecuador, Korea, Spain, Thailand, USA, and Japan.

If you have any of the following backgrounds, that may become your advantage when you join us.

• Psychology (cognitive, social, affect, ...)
• Human factors / ergonomics
• Human-XXX interaction (XXX = computer, machine, system, robot, human, ...)
• Interface design
• Programing
• Statistics
• Experiment design
• Multivariable analysis
• Design (industrial, product, graphical, service, ...)
• Marketing
• Brand management

However, you can learn these skills after you join us. You do not have to worry even if you do not have much so far.

On the other hand, in our laboratory, you will have many opportunities to work with other laboratory members as well as your supervisor.

Your skill to communicate, interact, and work with others (especially in English language) would be very important.

Again, we emphasize broad range of backgrounds and viewpoints among lab members.

We appreciate if you bring your own rich knowledge and experiences in your own background.

So if you are a undergraduate student or master student who are doing your thesis research project, please learn from your own research as much as possible. You can learn the knowledge specific for our fields after you join us.

While doing your own business, probably you can do just one practice which will be very important for our research.

That is: please try to think about other people around you.

What is he thinking about? How does she feel? Why is he doing this in that way? What if I say (or do) this to her? How can his value system be? How was her life? How can I imagine his personality?

People you know much. People you do not know much. People in different ages. People in different gender. People from different cultures. People walking to the opposite direction to yours.

This ability of insight, or the skill to see the world from the eyes of other people, is very essential for our research. However, you may need time to practice if you are not very familiar with this way.

So we recommend you to do this. You can do it whenever you want.