456 



PSYCHOLOGY OF STRESS 



"bad" patterns of adjustment in any moral- 

 istic sense. 



The purpose and goal of selection and 

 placement is to assign men to tasks which 

 maximally satisfy their dominant (conscious 

 and unconscious) needs and motivations, and 

 at the same time do not activate difficulties 

 in their adjustment by irritating particular 

 character weaknesses/ A person may ad- 

 just successfully to some situations, even 

 though he is a misfit in others. For exam- 

 ple, an accident-prone individual might be 

 placed to advantage in a commando or par- 

 atroop unit, where he could satisfy his 

 tendency to find excitement in risk — but not 

 aboard a submarine. Again, an individual 

 whose only point of vulnerability is a dread 

 of being alone should not necessarily be dis- 

 qualified for submarine duty, because the 

 occasion which would arouse his anxiety 

 would not exist in this situation. On the 

 contrary, his need for group support may 

 even facilitate his adjustment as a subma- 

 riner. 



Some Suggested Areas for Further Investiga- 

 tion. 



From a consideration of the various 

 causes of emotional stress discussed earlier in 

 this chapter, it is apparent that in many 

 ways our present knowledge of these factors 

 is inadequate. Before the conditions un- 

 derlying the development of emotional stress 

 can be understood adequately and con- 

 trolled, a number of intensive and extensive 

 investigations of these conditions must be 

 carried out. More specifically, some of the 

 problems which need further study are con- 

 cerned with: 



1. The nature of the basic personality fac- 

 tors which contribute toward an individual's 

 becoming a successfidly adjusted and effective 

 submariner. This problem involves several 



'' An analysis of some of the major problems 

 involved in the selection and placement of person- 

 nel, and some suggested solutions to them, have 

 been presented in descriptions of the OSS assess- 

 ment program (50,68). 



aspects, such as whether for such men com- 

 mon factors were present in: (a) their early 

 home and family life, their identification 

 patterns, and their characteristic attitudes 

 and modes of reacting to emotional stress, 

 (b) their ability to sever early emotional 

 dependencies on their family and to transfer 

 them to a contemporary adult group com- 

 posed of officers and men, or to identify 

 with some broad ideological frame of refer- 

 ence, and (c) their healthy development of 

 emotional stability and "snafu" tolerance in 

 the face of emergency situations. 



2. The stability of the motivational pattern 

 {or character structure) as a result of exposure 

 to the physical and emotional demands of a 

 given situation. Wheareas it may be that 

 men who have been in submarines for a 

 substantial period of time show character- 

 istic motivational patterns, the question may 

 be raised as to whether such consistency was 

 present when these men volunteered for sub- 

 marine duty. It may well be that constant 

 exposure to (and necessity of adjustment to) 

 the situation forced the divergent individual 

 patterns to converge upon the generally prev- 

 alent pattern. If this be the case, it is 

 important to discover the common factors 

 of adaptability in the character structure of 

 the men who were able to shift their motiva- 

 tional patterns to conform to the require- 

 ments of the submarine situation, as well as 

 the possible factors which were present in 

 those who proved unable to make this shift. 

 Two related problems are concerned with (a) 

 whether some degree of initial divergence 

 from the common pattern is desirable, and 

 (b) the nature and extent of the initial diver- 

 gence that may be tolerated so that the 

 necessary readjustments may be made with- 

 out undue emotional stress. 



3. The nature of the adjustive mechanisms 

 or integrative capacities which enable an indi- 

 vidual to tolerate and master emotional stress.^ 



8 The following example illustrates the eJEfec- 

 tiveness of adaptive mechanisms for handling 

 severe emotional stress: "One man on an anti- 

 aircraft gun shook so at the first airplane raid 



