The postwar occupational adjustment of emotionally disturbed soldiers.

Abstract

Job applicants with a history of severe emotional disturbance have recently become a major problem for those concerned with personnel selection. Some employers have adopted an explicit policy forbidding the hiring of people known to have such a history on the assumption that they do not represent good employment risks. Probably the majority, however, have established no specific policy, preferring to leave the matter to the discretion of individual employment interviewers. Prior to World War II the problem of establishing policy was, in fact, rarely raised, since interviewers found it very difficult to obtain specific information from applicants.Since the war it has become common practice to examine the discharge papers of applicants, or at least inquire about the conditions under which a man was separated from military service. Consequently, many personnel managers have become increasingly aware of the very considerable incidence of mental disease in the population. Unfortunately, however, little information is available as to the subsequent work histories of men who have suffered from severe emotional disturbances. Employers, caught between a very definite social pressure to hire all disabled veterans and their own misgivings as to the value of men with a history of neurosis or psychosis as workers, have lacked the factual data necessary to making valid policy decisions.The present paper represents an attempt to, at least in part, fill this gap, utilizing data gathered in connection with the Conservation of Human Resources Project's study of in-

The effect of a course in psychology on the attitudes of research and development supervisors.

“…Lecture 3. A brief survey of studies dealing with the relationship between emotional factors and performance was followed by a more detailed analysis of the Markowe (1953) and Miner and Anderson (1958) researches. There was also some discussion of various psychosomatic disorders based on studies presented in Life Stress and Bodily Disease (Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Dis-ease, 1950), of alcoholism, and of methods of identifying emotional pathology.…”