High unemployment has been one of the most disturbing features of the economy of the 1980s. For a precedent, one must look to the interwar period and in particular to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It follows that recent years have been marked by a resurgence of interest amongst academics in interwar unemployment. The debate has been contentious. There is nothing like the analysis of a period which recorded rates of un employment approaching 25 per cent to highlight the differences between competing schools of thought on the operation of labour markets. Along with historians, economists...

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Social and Environmental Psychology in the European Context, Lisbon, Portugal, September 22-26, 1986

These volumes represent the proceedings of NATO Advanced Study Institute on the topic of "Cognitive Processes and Spatial Orientation in Animal and Man" held at La-Baume-les-Aix, Aix-en-Provence, France, in June-July 1985. The motivation underlying this Institute stemmed from the recent advances and interest in the problems of spatial behavior. In Psychology, traditional S-R concepts were found to be unsatisfactorY for fully accounting for the complexity of spatial behavior. Coupled with the decline in such an approach, has been a resurgence of interest in cognitive types of concepts. In...

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, La-Baume-les-Aix (Aix-en-Provence), France, June 27-July 7, 1985

The following is a passage from our application for NATO sponsorship: "In the main, the participants in this workshop on the Psychophysics of Speech Perception come from two areas of research: - one area is that of speech perception researc, h, in which the perception of speech sounds is investigated; - the other area is that of psychoacoustics, or auditory psychophysics, in which the perception of simple non-speech sounds, such as pure tones or noise bursts, is investigated, in order to determine the properties of the hearing mechanism. Al though there is widespread agreement among both...

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Athens, Greece, December 10-20, 1984

In the preface to his noveL "SmaU WorLd" David Lodge writes: "When ApriL with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that Liquid by whose power the fLowers are engendered; when this zephyr, too, with its duLcet breath, had breathed Life into the tender new shoots ...then as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, foLk Long to go on piLgrimages. OnLy these days professionaL peopLe caU them conferences. " At the end of . June 1985 about 50 scientists drawn from a dozen different countries gathered in Aberdeen for a week to...

In recent years there has been a growing concern for the development of both efficient and effective ways to handle space-time problems. Such developments should be theoretically as well as empirically oriented. Regardless of which of these two arenas one enters. the impression is quickly gained that contemporary wO, rk on dynamic and evolutionary models has not proved to be as illuminating and rewarding as first anticipated. Historically speaking. the single. most important lesson this avenue of research has provided. is that linear models are woefully inadequate when dominant non-linear...

The New Police Officer During the past twenty years the tasks required of police officers have expanded and changed with dramatic rapidi ty. The tradi tional roles of the police had been those of law enforcement and the maintenance of public order. As a consequence police officers were typically large-bodied males, selected for their physical abilities and trained to accept orders and enforce the law. Over the past two decades, however, the industrialized nations have placed a variety of new demands on police officers. To traditional law enforcement and public order tasks have been added...

The central theme of this book is the role of energetical factors in the regulation of human information processing activity. This is a restatement of one of the classic problems of psychology - that of acc ounting for motivational or intensive aspects of behaviour, as opposed to structural or directional aspects. The term "energetics" was first used in the 1930's by Freeman, Duffy and others, following Cannon's energy mobilization view of emotion and motivation. The original concept had a limited life, probably because of its unnecessary focus on relativ ely peripheral processes, but it...