Keisuke Kokubun 1 ✉, Yousuke Ogata2, Yasuharu Koike 2 & Yoshinori Yamakawa1,2,3,4,5
Over the past two decades, the number of studies on work engagement has increased rapidly. Work
engagement refers to a positive, affective-motivational state of high energy combined with high
levels of dedication and a strong focus on work, leading to various work-related outcomes, including
higher work performance. Several studies have indicated that training or coaching may increase work
engagement, but other studies have shown contradicting results. These inconsistencies may be due
to the indirectness between training/coaching and work engagement. Therefore, we investigated
the relationship between training and brain structure as well as between brain structure and work
engagement in cognitively normal participants. Brain structure was assessed using neuroimagingderived
measures, including the gray-matter brain healthcare quotient (GM-BHQ) and the fractionalanisotropy
brain healthcare quotient (FA-BHQ), which are approved as the international standard
(H.861.1) by ITU-T. Work engagement was assessed using the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. To
validate and enrich the analysis, we employed another two representative questionnaires, which are
known to be close to but different from work engagement: The Social interaction Anxiety Scale and
the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey to gauge the levels of human relation ineffectiveness
and burnout. The latter scale is subdivided into three variables including “Exhaustion,” “Cynicism,”
and “Professional Efficacy.” The results of the present study indicate that training is associated with an
increase of FA-BHQ scores, and that an increase of the FA-BHQ scores is associated with an increase
in Work Engagement and a decrease in Cynicism. On the other hand, the training with coaching was
associated with a decrease in Interaction Anxiety. However, no correlation was observed for training
with Work Engagement or the subscales of Burnout. Likewise, no correlation was observed for FA-BHQ
with Exhaustion, Professional Efficacy, and Interaction Anxiety. The results of the current research
provide the possibility to use brain information to evaluate training effectiveness from the viewpoint of
neuroscience.

Keisuke Kokubun 1, Kiyotaka Nemoto 2 and Yoshinori Yamakawa 1,3,4,5,6

1 Open Innovation Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
2 Division of Clinical Medicine, Department of Neuropsychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
3 ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
4 Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Tokyo, Japan
5 Office for Academic and Industrial Innovation, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan
6 NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting, Inc., Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE: Front. Aging Neurosci., 20 March 2020
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2020.00076/full

Keisuke Kokubun 1, Yoshinori Yamakawa 1,2,3,4,5 and Kazuo Hiraki 6

1 Open Innovation Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan
2 ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), Chiyoda, Tokyo 100-8914, Japan
3 Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan
4 Office for Academic and Industrial Innovation, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan
5 NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting, Inc., Chiyoda, Tokyo 102-0093, Japan
6 Graduate School of Arts and Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Brain Sci. 2020, 10(3), 137; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10030137 Received: 18 January 2020 / Revised: 10 February 2020 / Accepted: 27 February 2020 / Published: 29 February 2020

Seiko Koizumi 1*, Naoki Inoue 1, Fumihito Sugihara 1 and Michiya Igase 2

1 Nitta Gelatin Inc., Osaka 581-0024, Japan; na-inoue@nitta-gelatin.co.jp (N.I.); fumihitosugihara@gmail.com (F.S.)
2 Department of Anti-aging Medicine, Ehime University Graduate School of Medicine, Ehime 791-0295, Japan; migase@m.ehime-u.ac.jp

* Correspondence: se-koizumi@nitta-gelatin.co.jp; Tel.: +81-72-948-8252
Received: 12 November 2019; Accepted: 19 December 2019; Published: 23 December 2019
www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/1/50/pdf

Keisuke Kokubun 1* and Yoshinori Yamakawa 1,2,3,4

1 Office of Society-Academia Collaboration for Innovation, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
2 ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), Chiyoda, Japan
3 Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Japan
4 NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting, Inc., Minato, Japan

ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 29 October 2019
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00384/full

Masahiro Kita 1, Satoshi Yoshida 1, Keiji Kondo 1, Yoshinori Yamakawa 2, Yasuhisa Ano 1

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
©2019. Research Laboratories for Health Science & Food Technologies, Kirin Company Limited. Neuropsychopharmacology Reports published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of The Japanese Society of Neuropsychopharmacology.
1 Research Laboratories for Health Science & Food Technologies, Kirin Company Limited, Yokohama, Japan
2 ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), Tokyo, Japan

First published 06 October 2019
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/npr2.12077

Keisuke Kokubun 1*, Kiyotaka Nemoto 2*, Hiroki Oka 3, Hiroki Fukuda 3, Yoshinori Yamakawa 1,3,4 and Yasuyoshi Watanabe 5

1 Office of Society-Academia Collaboration for Innovation, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
2 Division of Clinical Medicine, Department of Neuropsychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
3 ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, Chiyoda, Japan
4 Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Japan, 5 RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies, Yokohama, Japan

ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 24 July 2018
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00154/full

Kiyotaka Nemoto 1, Hiroki Oka 2, Hiroki Fukuda 2, Yoshinori Yamakawa 2*

1 Department of Neuropsychiatry, Division of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
2 ImPACT Program of Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan), Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan

Published: October 27, 2017
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187137