The Spread of Antarctic and South Pacific Research Behind the 2002 Hunter Award

This article brings together the publications that comprised my successful submission for the New Zealand Psychological Society's 2002 Hunter Award. One publication summarizes a number of projects on human adaptation to Antarctic conditions, and the others relate to stress/trauma assignments in the South Pacific. In comparison with the achievements of the pioneer in whose name the award was established, the collection makes only a slight contribution to the accumulation of knowledge--although the first does happen to be an appeal for the adoption of a general systems theory of which Sir Thomas Hunter might have approved, and the others (concerned with helping people to cope with the substantial demands imposed on them by different kinds of catastrophe) might not have escaped his attention (Taylor, 2003a). A long-term professional interest in the rehabilitation of offenders, together with the good fortune to sit at the feet of the ethnopsychologist Ernest Beaglehole at Victoria University of Wellington, and a chance encounter with the versatile experimentalist T.H. (Harry) Scott on his return from his PhD studies at McGill University, generated my commitment to human adaptation to different environmental and human stressors that has lasted almost a fifty years. Much of the resulting research output was sketched previously in valedictory papers on retirement from academia (Taylor, 1991a; 1991b, 1991c; 1991d: Lane & Taylor, 1991), but the latest Antarctic publication developed from an invited address to the First All-India Conference of Physiology held in New Delhi in 1995. The others were an extension of my clinical studies of casualties of disaster stress (Taylor, 1989a). The Antarctic paper was written simply as a plea for more researchers to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in the design and conduct of their studies (Taylor, 2002a). The invitation to digress on the theme came my way, because of research that I had undertaken in the Antarctic from 1967 to 1982 with the Antarctic Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (Taylor, 1987) and from 1983-1988 with Greenpeace (Taylor, 1989b (1); Taylor, & Brown, 1994). At the time the Indian Antarctic Research Programme was bearing fruit (Sachdeva, Naidu, Chhajer, Rai, Sandaresuan, 1994), and its promoters wanted to consider the conceptual and methodological issues they might encounter before embarking on a more ambitious plan for a more comprehensive investigation of human adaptation to polar conditions: the researchers were from the conventional scientific tradition that was more laboratory-based than clinical, naturalistic, and observational, but they accepted Crick's (1994) trenchant criticism of reductionism, and they were inclined to favour the early Baconian commitment to the integration of knowledge rather than to its fragmentation (Colverson, 1989). To give but two glaring examples of such fragmentation, a group of productive biological researchers conducted isolation studies in a specially constructed Tier Bunker facility at the Max Plank Institute at Amersee in Bavaria in the 1960's, and they measured carefully the dietary, hormonal, and gross body movements of their subjects for a month at a time (Aschoff, 1965; 1981). But from discussions on site in 1975 I found they ignored totally the cognitive and emotional responses of their participants, and they saw no need to conduct follow-up studies that might have led them to identify any adverse side-effects of the kind that Bexton, Heron, and Scott (1954) had found long before. Then, when visiting the library of the Johnson Space Center at Houston in 1987, I found that NASA had ignored behavioural science completely in its preparation for long-duration space flights, except for discerning the preference of its crews for capsule-windows and bulkhead decorations (Taylor 1989c). In fact the entire four and a half year Skylab Project (Johnston & Dietlin, 1977) that was designed to test the broadest sense of survival and the ability of humans to live effectively in apace stations, involved not one single psychological component Instead, the assembled team of biomedical scientists adopted an exclusive bio-engineering approach as they addressed the shifts of body fluids, and changes in muscular tone vestibular balance, orientation, sleep patterns, and circadian rhythms of their astronaut subjects up aloft. …

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