David A. Booth

David Booth works full-time in research and research teaching as an honorary professor at the School of Psychology in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences of the University of Birmingham (UK). According to his Web page he investigates the ways in which an individual's life works. His research and teaching centre on the processes in the mind that fit acts and reactions of human beings and animals to the passing situation.

Educational roots
Booth studied chemistry, physics and mathematics in school, then chemistry—in particular chemical physics—at university. Another student on a philosophy and psychology degree introduced him to the 1930s Cambridge work in analysis of the functioning of language

Academic career
Booth has been Professor of Psychology, earlier Reader in Physiological Psychology, Senior Lecturer and initially Lecturer in the Birmingham School of Psychology since 1972, with research staff funded by MRC, HEC, SERC, MAFF, AFRC and BBSRC. In 1966-72, he was Research Fellow in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, on his own funds from SERC, MRC and MHRF. He was elected to the Experimental Psychology Society in 1967. On joining the British Psychological Society in 1983, he was made a Fellow and later become Chartered Psychologist, a founding member of the Division of Health Psychology and professionally practising member of the Division for Teachers and Researchers in Psychology, ending as chair. His first employment within Psychology was as a postdoc at the Yale University Graduate School in 1964-6, initiating work on metabolic biochemistry and neuropharmacology in the laboratories of Neal E. Miller on his funds from NIH. From 1959 to 1964 he was employed as a graduate research worker in Henry McIlwain's Department of Neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry (and briefly the Institute of Neurology) in the University of London. After 3 years of registered study for a PhD in Biochemistry, he graduated by thesis in 1964. He registered for two years for a BA in Philosophy and Psychology (with Sociology option) at Birkbeck College, University of London, graduating with First Class Honours in 1962. He went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1955 to read Chemistry with Biochemistry, following secondary education at Dulwich College.

Work
David Booth carried out work that contradicted the theory that dual centres of the hypothalamus control eating, the lateral hypothalamus for hunger and the ventromedial hypothalamus for satiety and began to replace it with a theory of the control of food choice and intake through learnt connections distributed around the brain. With colleagues he built a simulation of the physiological and learning mechanisms influencing eating patterns in people and laboratory animals, and extended it to include cultural and interpersonal influences.

Booth's evidence with colleagues is that the regulation of metabolic states of the body through learnt eating can extend to nutrient-specific selection among foods. A flavoured food becomes more highly preferred when protein is lacking in the most recent meal, if protein in that distinctive food had previously repaired a lack of protein in people and in rats. People may have a similar learnt specific appetite for energy, whether from carbohydrate or fat (or indeed protein); Booth has suggested the same for water but not for salt, despite the lack of the innate appetite for sodium ions seen in several other species.

One of Booth's major contributions is a theory that influences are at their strongest when combined at their personally learnt levels, the individual's 'norm' for the situation. The theory was epitomised by the description of the phenomenon and coining of the term conditioned satiety. Booth also became well known for his criticisms of concepts of fixed palatabilities and satieties, confusion between preference and pleasure, and the failure of weight-loss products and hormone analogues. He considered it scientifically incoherent to claim that a medication or food constituent had a specifiable satiating power and an effect in itself on weight. He joined forces with the human rights activist Phil Booth to advocate culturally and biologically realistic education in personal tailoring of changes in specific patterns of behaviour in order to slow the increase in prevalence of obesity.

Booth's research from the start was distinctive in its attention to the performance of each individual in the situation investigated. This approach culminated in the construction from classic ideas and findings in psychology of a set of determinate mechanisms by which, on the basis of previous experience, an individual decides what to do as circumstances change. The theory encompasses the culture's perceived and expressed symbols as well as material stimulation of the senses and movements of the muscles. Hence it is being extended to facial signals of emotion, empathy for perceived personal need, and marketed concepts in interaction with products' sensed material characteristics.