Asako Miura, Ph. D.
	Associate Professor Department of Social Psychology Faculty of Humanities and Sciences Kobe Gakuin University [Contact Information]

Brief Self Introduction

I am an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences at Kobe Gakuin University, Japan. Before joining Kobe Gakuin University, I served on the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University as an assistant professor. I graduated in social psychology from Osaka University in 1992 and received my Ph. D. from that university in 2002.

I am a social psychologist who is primarily interested in group dymamics (i.e., how and why specific psychological processes vary in different groups and their interactions) as well as in computer-mediated communication. For details, my research interests include group creativity, emergence from group processes, and various kinds of computer-mediated communication and interaction.

I have recently proposed a theoretical model with my excellent colleague (Miura and Hida, 2004) to explain how member traits affect group-emergence properties in a creative idea generation. Our experimental results suggest that degrees of diversity and similarity among group members operate synergistically to produce a significant effect on creative performance.

Other projects with my collegues include the congestion effects in chat communication (Miura and Shinohara, 2005) and the psychological characteristics of information retrieval on the WWW (Fujihara and Miura, 2003). And I also have much interests in psychometrics and have published a book about structural equation modeling (SEM) with my mentor (Kano and Miura, 2002, in Japanese).

Recently I am especially interested in online knowledge sharing communities (i.e. Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia, etc) and carrying out some large-scale surveys with Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research(aka KAKENHI).

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