ABSTRACT
The Applied Psychology Unit was founded during the Second World War, based on a range of projects concerned with issues of military importance. Many of these were stress-related ranging from the impact of repeated combat missions on air crew to the effects of heat and acclimatisation on infantry and from the problems of maintaining alertness in radar operatives to coping with an overload of information in control rooms. Several of these problems continued to occupy the Unit after the war, with extensive research on watch keeping, sleep deprivation and shift work forming a sustained part of the Unit’s programme. One of the achievements of Donald Broadbent’s classic book Perception and Communication was his proposal of an overarching theoretical framework that would encompass the classic issues of attention perception and memory, together with their potential changes under stress. An important part of Broadbent’s approach concerned the differences between individuals in the way in which they respond, linking this to differences in personality. This remained a focal interest of Donald’s after he left the Unit, as reflected in his substantial later work Decision and Stress and his subsequent work in Oxford, relating stress to the quality of life of production line workers in the car industry.
