Explores some of the recent thinking in psychology along the lines that people are inherently inconsistent over time, and that the differences within an individual are as important as the differences among individuals. The 26 papers, most presented at conferences since 1988 (and many researchers hav

Discusses and explains reversal theory. A definitive statement of the theory along with research support in a wide variety of areas across the social sciences and biology is presented. Its main features, its patterns of opposition in motivational styles, and its phenomenological foundations are also noted.

In order to gain a clearer understanding of stress and its physical and psychological consequences, reversal theory takes into account the fact that many people need stress in their lives in order to operate. This text organizes stress and health research that has been undertaken within the reversal theory framework. The first two chapters outline and provide a focus about reversal theory, thus acting as a bridge to the rest of the text. For those new to reversal theory, tables and figures are included Which Summarize Some Of The Characteristics Of The Metamotivational states identified in the theory, and show how they can be applied systematically. The following section deals with the effects of stress, including: stressful events; academic stress; and back pain and work stress. It then tackles the subjects of the physiology and psychology of smoking and attempts to quit this sort of addiction, and the risk-taking behaviours of parachuting and unsafe sexual practice. Finally the book Examines Health-Promoting Behaviours And The Factors Which Facilitate Or inhibit them.

Reversal Theory is a new general theory of motivation, emotion, personality, psychopathology and stress which challenges previous ideas in these fields and sets up an unusually broad and integrative conceptual framework of its own. The papers in the six sections which make up this volume are concerned with: - developing the theory itself - looking at different research areas, or psychological problems, from the perspective of reversal theory - describing empirical studies of different kinds aimed at testing ideas drawn from the theory.

The notion that fundamental equations governing the motions of physical systems are invariant under the time reversal transformation (T) has been an important, but often subliminal, element in the development of theoretical physics. It serves as a powerful and useful tool in analyzing the structure of matter at all scales, from gases and condensed matter to subnuclear physics and the quantum theory of fields. The assumption of invariance under T was called into question, however, by the 1964 discovery that a closely related assumption, that of CP invariance (where C is charge conjugation and P is space inversion), is violated in the decay of neutral K mesons. In The Physics of Time Reversal, Robert G. Sachs comprehensively treats the role of the transformation T, both as a tool for analyzing the structure of matter and as a field of fundamental research relating to CP violation. For this purpose he reformulates the definitions of T, P, and C so as to avoid subliminal assumptions of invariance. He summarizes the standard phenomenology of CP violation in the K-meson system and addresses the question of the mysterious origin of CP violation. Using simple examples based on the standard quark model, Sachs summarizes and illustrates how these phenomenological methods can be extended to analysis of future experiments on heavy mesons. He notes that his reformulated approach to conventional quantum field theory leads to new questions about the meaning of the transformations in the context of recent theoretical developments such as non-Abelian gauge theories, and he suggests ways in which these questions may lead to new directions of research.