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The article presents the text of a paper given by psychologist R.B. Buzzard to the Occupational Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society on July 1, 1966, which deals with general practice. The National Institute of Industrial Psychology was founded 45 years ago with the object of fostering the application of psychological and physiological principles to the problems of working life. Together with the Medical Research Council's Industrial Fatigue Research Board, later its Industrial Health Research Board, with which it was closely associated in the twenties, it pioneered the way for investigations in this field. After the war, the few places in which research in industrial psychology had previously been carried on were surrounded by research groups in the fighting services, in government departments and ministries, in operational research groups in big industries, in university departments and laboratories and in technical colleges. But the groups which were concerned especially with industrial psychology have decided to examine particular aspects of the subject for intensive study. If one is to apply their results to the problems of working life in practice, one has to learn how the bits work when put together.

In this paper Dr. Miles, Director of the Institute, continues the discussion of fatigue from a more psychological point of view. He indicates some of the less obvious directions in which it causes economic loss ; especially the fatigue due to changes in methods of payment or of work, the fatigue of the firm's outside representatives, and, finally, the mental fatigue of executives and research workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a study which examined the personality characteristics of business students in a technological university in Bradford, England. Since business courses are more directly vocational than many degree subjects, they can be expected to attract students with fairly precise vocational intentions. These students may be identifying themselves primarily with their future vocational roles. In terms of their values and personality characteristics they may have more in common with the practicing businessman than with other university students. One undergraduate entry into the Bradford School of Administrative and Business Studies comprised 41 students, of whom 37 completed questionnaires. The male and female students were sufficiently alike in the characteristics to be treated as one group. The American experience of students of low ability and low socioeconomic status taking up business studies more or less by default is apparently not being repeated at Bradford. Business students were similar to other students in their personality characteristics being if anything somewhat more extravert than the norm.

This article focuses on a study which analyzed the application of the Applied Psychology Unit Occupational Interests Guide, a test designed by researcher S.J. Closs, to measure occupational and leisure interests. This guide consists of 112 pairings of occupational and leisure activities chosen to represent in equal numbers eight broad categories of interest. Factor analysis of the guide interest scores of random samples of 500 boys and 500 girls from the 3rd year group was carried out and confirmed that the basic structure of the guide was sound in at least seven of the eight interest categories. However, the presence of some rather subtle response sets had been revealed by this factor analyses and also by item analysis carried out by Closs. Fresh items have now been composed to replace the less satisfactory ones and the revised version of the guide is being submitted to factor and item analyses. It is hoped to have a usable version suitable for publication early in 1969 with separate forms for boys and girls.

The article presents the speeches by Frank A. Geldard, Donald Wallis, and Bernard Ungerson that were delivered during the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society held at St. Andrews, Scotland in March 28-April 1, 1957. Wallis and Ungerson introduce the papers presented at the conference, which was focused on engineering psychology.

The work on which this paper is based was undertaken as part of a larger study of the relations between technical change and social structure in the steel industry which is being carried out by the industrial research team of' the Department of Social Science. University of Liverpool. This study is partly financed by a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research under the Counterpart Aid Scheme, and by funds made available by the European Productivity Agency of O.E.E.C. The interviewing for the particular aspect of the work described here was carried out by Olive Ranks, J. Kirkby, J. Banks, and Pauline Thayer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the task of a psychologist to discover the rules or laws governing mental activity. It examines three experiments in which a set of targets, equiprobable to the experimenter, are treated by the subjects as non-equiprobable. In one of the experiments, for the experimenter, the elements constitute a uniform display. The same feature characterized a further preliminary experiment. A subject is told that to each square has been assigned a number, and this number is recorded on a ticket in an urn. Three tickets will be successively drawn at random from the urn, with replacement after each draw. Before each draw, the subject indicates the square, which he thinks will be located by the ticket drawn. A Chi-square test shows that the first and third choices depart significantly from a uniform distribution, but not the second choice. The responses constitute a way of patterning the display, this patterning presumably being shaped by experience. The variation of pattern as between the three experiments suggests that the pattern or structure imposed is sensitive to the display and to the task.

The article presents the text of the Chairman's Address given by psychologist G.A. Randell to the Occupational Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society on February 10, 1966, which deals with industrial behavior. It is a chairman's privilege to take the opportunity in his valedictory address to comment upon the state of the subject and attempt some suggestions on the directions of future progress. Because of the sheltered nature of the occasion for him he can attempt to gain progress both by hoping that the suggestions made are of some kind of use to the work, or thinking, of some of the members of his audience, and by being controversial, stimulate subsequent lines of thought and discussion amongst members of the Section. These are the author's intentions in this address. When studying human behaviour in the laboratory one is able to define, isolate and sometimes even measure variables that help one to describe how people differ one from another. Similarly the study of various experimental conditions that can affect human behaviour in a laboratory setting is well advanced. However, such studies are usually based on rather simplified, and usually single, measures of behaviour or performance. Hence what they gain in precision they lack in generality. Nevertheless general theoretical formulations about human behaviour have been put forward as a result of such experiments.

Comments on an article which discussed the criterion problem in selection and guidance, in relation to psychology. Distinction between objective and subjective criteria; Importance of a criterion; Application of job analysis.