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methodologies. Unfortunately Gracely’s chapter on Pain Psychophysics com- bines a repetition of basic psychophysics which is available in simple psy- chology texts with an uncomfortably naive concept of pain, suggesting that pain report, pain behaviour and “actual pain” are independent of each other and that “pain assessment would be simplified greatly if verbal report always accurately reflected sensory input” (p. 223). This idiosyncrasy may alienate readers who might be interested in his separation of discrimination into “sensory intensity” and “psychophysical ability” although he presents too little detail of the studies for independent evaluation.

Taken as a whole, the book presents a valuable new format for serious reading in Behavioural Medicine. The individual chapters vary in their style and context in ways that reflect the fields of research. The book is likely to be of most value to students on postgraduate courses and to researchers in Behavioural Medicine.

Marie Johnston Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine,

University of London

L.W.C. TAVECCHIO and M.H. VAN IJZENDOORN, Attachment in Social

Networks (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1987) pp. xx + 483, 262.30.

The book begins with a useful review of research on attachment and outlines some of the issues which are to be examined in the volume. These include, the stability of attachment, cross-cultural differences, and the need to move away from Bowlby’s original suggestion about monotropism. However, at this point in the book it is daunting to be told that attachment theory may be at the ‘“saturation phase”.

The second chapter uses the “perceived security scale” to examine the monotropy hypothesis. This questionnaire asks parents about the way their child reacts to potentially threatening situations. One possible criticism of the scale is that it will tend to treat attachment as a t&dimensional characteristic. Children who are assessed as more secure according to the scale are more likely to have mothers working outside the home, have more extensive non- maternal care, and have mothers who are less strongly involved with child- rearing. As the authors readily admit the findings based on parental reports need to be substantiated. Thus, while the findings are of considerable interest because they contradict many of the assumptions present in developmental psychology, a person who wanted to defend the monotropy hypothesis would have little difficulty calling into question the validity of the findings.

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The research reported by Smith and Noble consists of an elegant study where parents were provided with free baby sitters who collected data on the children’s reaction to separation and reunion. Support for the Ainsworth classification of attachment was found in that A type and C type infants were more likely to show ambivalance to their mother on her return. The research also indicated that children with experience of previous separations were more positive at separations and greetings of both the mother and sitter. It is of course difficult to establish whether parents of more secure infants are more likely to leave them because of this characteristic or because such experiences lead to this attachment pattern.

The chapter by Goosens reports a failure to find differences between children in their attachment classification according to whether or not their mother is employed outside the home. As in the Smith and Noble study, there were indications that experience of separations leads to a more stable reaction in the strange situation. IJzendoorn, van der Veer, and van Vliet-Visser examine the relation between attachment patterns, behaviour in the strange situation with ratings of ego-resiliency and problem solving three years later. Attachment classification was not found to be related to later ego-resiliency and only in a limited way to later maternal behaviour during problem solving. In contrast, there were some relations between the behaviour during the strange situation and the later variables. Surprisingly, the authors do not dwell on the implications of these findings for the validity of the attachment classification.

Kreppner considers changes in family interaction following the birth of a second child, a topic of personal interest. The measures and some of the analyses I found difficult to follow. The main findings from the study appear to be that during the first year mothers tend to look after child 2, and fathers look after child 1. However, some hope is held out for my own personal circumstances in that by the second child’s second year mother and father do begin to interact. Van Vliet-Visser and van IJzendoorn describe the reactions of five families to the birth of a second child and the first child’s progress three years later. The descriptions of the first children’s difficulties draws attention to this much neglected topic. The authors conclude from their observations that secure relations prior to the birth of a sibling do not prevent disruption in the behaviour of the first born. The chapter by Vergeer is an analysis of these same five families. Vergeer attempts to examine changes in the pattern of social interaction and attachment following the birth of a second child. Unfortunately, insufficient details are given about the actual behaviours that were coded and this, together with a reliance on descriptions in terms of frequencies and percentages limits the interest in the chapter. Hubbard and van IJzendoorn report a replication of the Ainsworth study of the relation between maternal responsiveness and crying. They found that a lack of responsiveness was related to less crying at a larger date when the

Book reviews 205

measures were adjusted according to the behaviour in the previous quarter. The study is certainly a useful one and will add to the continuing discussions about the effect of responding to infant distress.

Kroonenberg and van IJzendoorn perform various analyses on data from 410 subjects in the strange situation collected in six previous studies. The statistical analyses support the clinical classification developed for the strange situation but suggest that the differences between classification types may not be as discrete as supposed by the system. Sagi and Lewkowicz review the different patterns of attachment in different cultures. They identify deviations from standard procedure in a number of studies and discuss the problem of the same physical events having different meanings in different cultures. I did find it surprising that they reject the possibility that there could be differences between cultures in the prevalence of different types of attachment. I think one should be prepared to accept that there are differences between cultures in attachment types without making value judgments about the quality of child rearing.

Unfortunately, I have a number of criticisms of the book. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the book is its organization. Many of the chapters suffer from having long introductions which can be annoying when the same material is covered in different places. Coupled with this is the frequent lack of basic information about methodology. For example, a description of the strange situation occurs in several places, but it would have been helpful to have had a comprehensive outline of the behavioural and psychological differences between the different subgroups of attachment types explained early on in the book. In addition, although the research is going to be of most interest to the specialist reader (or at least most easily understood by them), the introductions often seem to be designed for someone of little knowledge of the area. Another small point is that I would have liked to have seen the relation between the different studies spelt out, especially where the same subjects were used in different write-ups. Furthermore, there are a greater number of typos than usual in the book with some interesting phrases and names (e.g., Vygotskij).

The book does provide good value in that a large number of studies are reported and the studies usually contain a large number of subjects and are longitudinal in nature. However, I did have a feeling that I had reached the saturation phase with some of the research; often it did not lead to resolution of issues, or the research paradigm appeared to be one of examining the relations among a large number of measures. In addition, Sagi’s criticisms of the strange situation made one wonder how wise it has been to build up a research edifice on this paradigm. Thus, I have my doubts as to whether the book clearly advances our understanding of this area. Despite these criticisms, I expect that the book will become important reading for those conducting research on human attachment simply because of the large number of studies

206 Book reviews

that have been reported, and because many of the chapters address key issues in this research field.

David J. Messer The Hatfield PO&technic

R.A. BOAKES, D.A. POPPLEWELL, and M.J. BURTON (Eds), Eating Habits: Food, Physiology and Learned Behaviour (Wiley, Chichester 1987) pp. xii + 225. E20.00.

The psychology of human eating behaviour is gaining an increasingly important position in psychology. This volume follows two recent books on The Psychology of Eating (Logue) and The Pathology of Eating (Gilbert). Eating and drinking behaviour was formerly the province of physiological psychology, with animal models and brain lesions or stimulation attempting to provide models for the initiation and cessation of eating and drinking. Whilst physiological psychology still has a great deal to offer in this area, there are many other areas of psychology with an important input into understanding not only animal eating but also human eating behaviour. One such area is clinical psychology where there has been an enormous growth of interest over the past few years in eating disorders.

This increasingly diverse input from psychology is represented in the present volume, with two chapters discussing primarily animal models of eating (LeMagnen and Deutsch), whereas the other chapters are on purely human behaviour. These range from the disorders of eating of bulimia (Palmer), anorexia (Szmukler), along with obesity (Bennett), to chapters on normal eating (Booth) and considerations of feeding in early infancy (Wright) and learning during childhood (Birch).

The subtitle of “Food, Physiology and Learned Behaviour” might lead the reader to expect a much more physiologically orientated book than it actually is. There are a number of physiological models for the effects of neurochem- icals in determining both onset and offset of eating, along with food selection, which are not covered in any detail. However, in a book of this size it is not possible to cover all of the possible areas of research. One of the common themes of the book is in relating the research discussed to theories of learning making the “Learned Behaviour” subtitle more appropriate.

It is a multi-authored volume based partly on a meeting held at the University of Sussex in 1984. It differs from the conference in having some extra chapters not presented at the conference whilst some of the conference papers are not in the book. Unfortunately this long delay in publication means that some of the more recent work may not be covered. However, some of the