Professor Kaori Schau of the Asian Studies Department took a group of students to Japan for May Interim, 2016, and asked the students to keep journals from their home-stay experiences. Her interest was in discovering if the students had learned empathy in their encounters with native speakers of Japanese. The twelve students had all taken at least one year of language study.

Schau is writing an article about learned empathy in cross-cultural experiences and hopes to send the article off for publication by the end of this summer. She also plans to take another group of students to Japan in May, 2020, when she will continue to explore this subject.