No abstract

Two U.S. Army armored cavalry squadrons (N= 660), one in Europe (USAREUR), stationed on the East German border, and one in the continental U.S. (CONUS), were administered an English version of a questionnaire widely used in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to assess morale, cohesion and soldier perception of unit readiness for combat. Analysis of inter‐item correlations, including factor analyses, revealed a generally similar structure of morale in the U.S. units and a comparable IDF sample stationed along the Lebanon border (N= 1270). All three data sets were organized around a group factor, a leadership factor, and two individual factors, one personal and one professional. National differences were apparent with regard to the relationship between morale and perceived contribution to national security, confidence in weapons, and confidence in senior commanders. In several other respects the USAREUR unit resembled the IDF sample far more than it resembled its sister unit in the U.S. As a whole the data are consistent with the view that morale has relatively similar determinants across armies, but that both national characteristics and situational characteristics (e.g., proximity to a potential foe and/ or battlefield) play a role in the relative importance of these determinants.

A large civilian literature on the role of social support in health and well‐being suggests that military units high in unit cohesion should provide their members both significant protection from physical and mental illness and high levels of job satisfaction. This hypothesis was tested with a questionnaire survey of soldiers in Special Forces “A‐teams”, generally viewed as the U.S. Army's most cohesive permanent units. As predicted, A‐team soldiers reported greater physical and psychological well‐being and greater satisfaction with job and career than did soldiers in conventionally organized units, be they Special Forces, airborne, or mechanized infantry. The best predictors in our battery of demographic, personality, and cohesion measures were ratings of social support from and satisfaction with one's Army unit, and relatively more “internal” scores on the Rotter locus‐of‐control scale. From these data and extensive participant observation we conclude that unit cohesion provides the soldier considerable protection from the stresses of military life, even in peace, and that it is organizational rather than individual variables that are primarily responsible for the very high levels of cohesion and/or social support in Special Forces A‐teams.

Visual discrimination performance of normal monkeys and monkeys with inferotemporal or foveal prestriate lesions was compared. In Experiment 1 the inferotemporal group was impaired in learning object and color discriminations but the foveal prestriate group showed a deficit only on the object problems. The inferotemporal group showed impaired retention of color discrimination after interpolation of an object discrimination and impaired retention of object discrimination after interpolation of a color discrimination, but normal retention when the original and interpolated problems were both either object or color discriminations. By contrast, retention by the other groups was not affected by the type of interpolated material. In Experiment 2, only the foveal prestriate group was impaired on pattern discrimination when irrelevant stimuli were added. Results are discussed in terms of perceptual and associative learning disorders.