Standardized clinical instruments were used to examine a consecutive series of 89 mental hospital admissions in the west of Ireland and 174 admissions representative of mental hospital admissions in London. The diagnoses given to these patients by the U.S./U.K. Project psychiatrists were compared with diagnoses given the same patients by the hospital psychiatrists in the two countries. Similar levels of agreement were obtained between hospital and Project psychiatrists in the two countries and, where the alcoholic patients were removed, the proportion diagnosed as schizophrenic by the Project in the two samples was identical.

Much of the development of behavioural methods of treatment for phobic anxiety has relied on volunteer subjects participating in analogue studies investigating appropriate procedures. In this study a group of volunteer subjects with specific phobias is compared on psychometric tests with phobic patients and a normal control group. Results indicate significant differences between the volunteers and patients, in spite of the two groups sharing a common disabling symptom. The patients are distinguished by their high level of neuroticism, anxiety, and general psychiatric symptomology. Such differences raise difficulties of interpretation and indicate the need for caution in the extrapolation of analogue study results to the clinical situation.

This paper presents findings from a controlled investigation of psychomotor performance in depression and mania to test Court's (1968) continuum model. This model proposes that, unlike the common bipolar view of depression and mania, there is a continuum ranging from normal, through depression, to mania. Simple reaction time measures did not confirm this hypothesis. However, results of more complex psychomotor performance did provide some confirmation, and, also, provided evidence of a ‘central processing’ deficit in both manic and depressed subjects.

On the Aubert illusion, involving judgement of visual vertical in the absence of visual field cues, depressed patients were shown to display regressive tendencies compared with controls. In fact, their performance was very similar to that of children. However, their performance at judging postural vertical without the use of visual field cues was normal. The impaired performance of the depressed patients was compared with the deficits observed on the same experimental tasks for various other groups of patients with psychiatric or neurological disorders.

The Unit for Research on Addictive Drugs, University of Aberdeen, was established in October 1973 in order to facilitate the continuation and expansion of the research activities of the Department of Pharmacology in the field of narcotic analgesics when Professor H. W. Kosterlitz retired from the Chair of Pharmacology. The formation of the unit was made possible by the provision of sufficient laboratory and office space by the university, by the continuing support from the U.S. Committee on Problems of Drug Dependence, and a new substantial grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention), now provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.