Book Reviews 103

cultures. The five contributions, from authors from North and South America, Australia, Britain and Switzerland are on: human categorization; malnutrition and mental development; coping with unfamiliar cultures; Freudian theory; the universality or relativism of Piagetian cognitive concepts.

DECODING ORAL LANGUAGE, A. H . Wold. London, Academic Press (European Monographs in Social Psychology), 1978. No. of pages: xi + 214.

This monograph from the Institute of Psychology of the University of Oslo attempts to relate a social psychological perspective on language to an analysis of individual psycholinguistic processing. The importance of temporal processes in language use and understanding is examined in several experimental studies of impression formation and verbal recall. The empirical work is situated within the 'message structure' framework of Rommetweit and his colleagues.

COLIN FRASER Universiry of Cambridge, U. K .

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, edited by G. M. Andreyeva, N. N. Bogomolova et al.

This volume, comprising articles written by members of the Department of Social Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology of Lomonosov University and faculty collaborators, represents another significant step forward in the elaboration of theoretical and methodological foundations of Soviet social psychology. This is evident from highly stimulating analyses contained in most of the studies included in the volume. Let us touch upon the most important ideas.

The study entitled 'Methodological problems and practice of socio- psychological research' differentiates among three planes of methodo- logical analysis. v iz . (a) general methodology representing philoso- phical approach, (b) special methodology of a given scientific discipline, and (c) sum of concrete research methods. Marxist social psychology is based upon the premise of the dependence of concrete methods on general as well as special methodologies. Thus, for instance, a group cannot be analysed solely o n a level of empiric description of acts of individual activity in interactions. Rather i t is necessary for i t to be put into a broad 'context' of social 'relations. That of course necessitates the finding of intermediate grades. It is necessary to design a research programme incorporating each research task into so-called 'social context' and to prepare a research study linking up the consideration of the subject with thc consideration of methodology and consideration of research practice with that of the reflection of this practice.

Compared with the customary interdisciplinary view of social psychology a further study 'On defining the tasks and methods of social psycholog), in the light of the principle of activity' emphasizes as the basis of the principle of activity its 'intra-disciplinary' character. As a result, this character is assimilated both by psychology and sociology. The study demonstrates this by examining a