The thinker who has a mortal fear of being wrong will give all that is valuable in himself to that little ambition. Walter Lippmann (1914) Psychology has always been plagued by passing fads and fan­ cies to a greater extent than is seemly in a scientific discipline. Over the past few years the Zeitgeist can be summed up by the two words 'cognitive psychology'. Indeed, a recent poll of academic psychologists in American indicated that over 80% of them regarded themselves as cognitive psychologists! Cognitive psychology is in the ascendant, but it has never been clear to me that it has addressed all of the appropriate is­ sues. In particular, information processing in the real world (and even in the laboratory) occurs within a motivational and emotional context, but cognitive psychologists usually main­ tain the convenient fiction that cognition can fruitfully be stud­ ied in isolation. The main reason for writing this book was to at­ tempt to demonstrate that there can be a useful cross-fertiliza­ tion between cognitive and motivational-emotional psycholo­ gy and that there are already tantalizing glimpses of the poten­ tial advantages of such inter-disciplinary research. The ideas of Donald Broadbent and his associates have exer­ cised a formative influence during the writing of this book. They discovered some years ago that there are intriguing simi­ larities (as well as differences) in the effects on performance of such apparently quite disparate factors as white noise, time of day, introversion-extraversion and incentive.

1 Introduction.- 2 Theories of Attention.- 2.1 Early Theories.- 2.2 Posner and Snyder: Automatic Activation and Conscious Attention.- 2.3 Shiffrin and Schneider: Controlled and Automatic Processes.- 2.4 Treisman and Gelade: Features and Objects.- 2.5 Summary.- 3 Theories of Processing Resources.- 3.1 Baddeley and Hitch: Working Memory.- 3.2 Norman and Bobrow: Data-Limited and Resource-Limited Processes.- 3.3 Johnston and Heinz: Multi-Mode Theory.- 3.4 Navon and Gopher: Multiple Resources.- 3.5 Conclusions.- 4 Theories of Arousal and Performance.- 4.1 The Yerkes-Dodson Law.- 4.2 Easterbrook's Hypothesis.- 4.3 Broadbent: Decision and Stress.- 4.4 Näätänen's Theory.- 4.5 Kahneman: Attention and Effort.- 4.6 Thayer: Self-Reported Arousal.- 4.7 Hasher and Zacks: Automatic and Effortful Processes.- 4.8 Summary and Conclusions.- 5 Incentives and Motivation.- 5.1 Reinforcement and Incentives.- 5.2 Learning and Memory: Atkinson and Wickens (1971).- 5.3 Short-Term Memory: Weiner.- 5.4 Task Characteristics.- 5.5 Performance Efficiency.- 5.6 Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation.- 5.7 A Theoretical Overview.- 6 Anxiety and Performance.- 6.1 Worry and Emotionality.- 6.2 Working Memory Capacity.- 6.3 Spence and Spence (1966): Task Difficulty.- 6.4 Anxiety and Motivation.- 6.5 Failure and Shock.- 6.6 Failure and Success: A Cognitive Approach.- 6.7 Depth and Elaboration of Processing.- 6.8 Theoretical Positions.- 7 Endogenous Determinants of Arousal.- 7.1 Introversion - Extraversion.- 7.2 Time of Day.- 7.3 Sleep Deprivation.- 8 Exogenous Determinants of Arousal: Noise.- 8.1 Vigilance Task Performance.- 8.2 Continuous Tasks: Serial Reaction and Tracking.- 8.3 Learning and Memory.- 8.4 Attentional Selectivity.- 8.5 Theoretical Formulation.- 8.6 Summary.- 9 Conclusions andSpeculations.- 9.1 The Yerkes-Dodson Law.- 9.2 Stages of Processing.- 9.3 Two Arousal Systems.- 10 References.- 11 Author Index.- 12 Subject Index.