New Directions in Psychology III: By George Mandler, Paul Mussen, Nathan Kogan, and Michael Wallach. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967. 289 pp.

This volume is the third in a series that reports, to quote from the forward by Theodore Newcomb, 'new developments of specific interest against older and more familiar backdrops … deliberately chosen to range across psychology's broad spectrum'. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, George Mandler discusses three models of verbal learning. In the second, Paul Mussen reviews recent work on early socialization with particular reference to studies of learning and identification. In the third, Nathan Kogan and Michael Wallach discuss research on 'risk taking'. Earlier volumes in this series have included papers by William Dement on dreaming, Frank Barron on creativity, and Eckhard Hess on ethology. The style of the present volume is moderately popular, and relatively unobtrusive; the references are reasonably current; the papers attempt to fill the gap between the technical paper and the more general review. Unfortunately, an appropriate middle ground is hard to find. For someone who has only a passing interest in, say, early socialization, the chapter by Mussen is too ambitious to be satisfying; on the other hand, a specialist would find it too