PSYCHOLOGY IN INDUSTRY 



and training, differences in family circumstances and finan- 

 cial status, differences in worries, anxieties, hopes, and 

 ambitions. 



Not only in transportation companies have these basic 

 principles and practical methods of eliminating accidents 

 proved valid. They apply equally to safety work in fac- 

 tories, on aviation fields, and on the public highway. 



Understanding and Control of Fatigue. The effects of exces- 

 sive work — whether traceable to long hours, rapid pace, 

 insufficient rests, muscular overload, nervous tension, 

 inefficient ways of working, lack of training, or other 

 cause — are sometimes primarily physiological, sometimes 

 psychological. 



Decreased capacity to do the work in hand is an obvious 

 indicator of changes that work produces. By some in- 

 vestigators, reduced output has been taken as a measure of 

 fatigue. Others have resorted to counts of accidents, 

 errors, or spoiled work as indexes. Such studies have had to 

 reckon with the amazing power of the human being to 

 spurt, to nerve himself to special effort, to pull himself 

 together and perform his task with precision and speed in 

 spite of weariness or exhaustion. The problem is compli- 

 cated — particularly so since there has been found no close 

 relationship between the objective facts of decreased 

 capacity for work and the subjective feelings of being tired. 



Feelings of weariness are often entangled with feelings of 

 boredom, ennui, or distaste for the job. So investigators 

 have sometimes found themselves facing questions about 

 the nature of monotony, or interest in work as related to 

 differences of ability and personality, when their initial 

 problem was that of the nature, causes, or effects of fatigue. 



Indeed, the concept of industrial fatigue has proved to be 

 rather ambiguous. Richard M. Page, for example, favors 

 abandoning the term and speaking instead of "energy- 

 cost," a quantity the physiologists are in a way to measure 



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