We describe a case of Epidemic Psychological Disturbance (EPD) involving 110 pupils at a Catholic Girls Secondary School in Malawi. The EPD 'syndrome' included 'outward' behaviours (screaming, continuous laughing, crying loudly, falling down and rolling, violently threatening classmates,...

Western (or "First World') societies continue to be confronted by the ever growing prob lem of "Third World" poverty. Financial donationsfrom "Western "publics are onepos sible contribution to seeking remedies, but these partly depend on donor experience and perceptions, which are likely to be...

Against a backdrop in which in which psychology is being increasingly criticised for failing to meet the pressing needs of Third World' peoples, we report findings from Malawi relevant to the management of health services in the tropics. Surveys of beliefs regarding malaria, schistosom iasis,...

The last global review of the role of psychology in developing countries was edited by Sinha and Holtzman in 1984. This paper evaluates journal publications appearing in the Psychlit database in the decadefollowing Sinha and Holtzman's review, focusing on studies which contain scientific...

Psychology has, at best, only made a modest contribution to efforts aimed at resolving the problems of developing societies. While other disciplines have produced specialisations addressing the difficulties of the world's poorer nations, psychology has failed to do so. It is suggested that...

'A mush of meaningless gobbledegook' (Blunt and Jones, 1997, p. 913). It has been hard to know how to formulate a response to Blunt and Jones' scholarly rebuke of our paper on 'The meaning of work in Malawi' (Carr et al., 1997), in which we present data that are neither 'obvious' nor...

Human resources are increasingly seen as vital to developing nations, but studies of work motivation remain focused on manager elites rather than the general workforce, and on motivation 'at' particular workplaces rather than the wider meaning 'of' work in societies at large. In an adaptation of...

Achieving the MDG goal of reducing world poverty by 50% by 2015 requires the cooperative effort of many disciplines. To date the discipline of organizational psychology has not played as significant a role as it might in this endeavor. With the recent establishment of the Global Task Force for...

The study aimed to provide the first general description of chamba-related admissions to Zomba Mental Hospital, the major psychiatric facility in Malawi, and to analyse the distinctiveness of this patient group from other admissions. A questionnaire was verbally administered to 50 chamba abusers...

Objective: Prospective studies have linked both negative affective states and trait neuroticism with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. However, identifying how fluctuations in cardiovascular activity in day-to-day settings are related to changes in affect and stable...