Animal Motivation Studies. (Experimental Studies on the Albino Rat.) By C. J. Warden and Collaborators. New York:  Columbia University Press, 1931. Pp.  xii,  502.

This comparatively large volume is given to a presentation of the results gained through an experimental investigation of animal motivation extending over a period of five years and including the measurement and comparison of the “drives” associated with hunger, thirst, maternity, and various sex conditions. The technic, which is described in detail, was arranged according to the Columbia Obstruction Method, devised by

Jenkins and Warden, and the white rat was used throughout as the experimental animal.

Several chapters of the book have previously been published as separate papers and monographs, although in most instances the material has been suitably modified for the present purpose. The results of these numerous carefully controlled studies are set forth in elaborately constructed tables and graphs. Nearly half of the book is devoted to the “sex drive,” including studies on the determination of norms for the sex drive, on the effect of segregating the sexes at various stages of the life cycle before testing, and on the variations in the drive produced by gonadectomy and vasotomy and by injection of extracts of male and female gonadal hormones.

The results obtained by these extensive and well controlled experiments are described in such a wealth of detail and discussed from so many different angles that any attempt to outline the findings in a short review would fail to reveal the real scope of the work, but those interested in the development and modifications of instincts and tendencies, and particularly those who favor the “behavioristic approach” to psychology, should find many new physiological facts and psychoanalysts should be able to relate and correlate several of the findings, with some of their own material obtained by another method of approach. Interferences with the sexual cycle and sex perversions among animals have been discussed at some length in one of the papers. The bibliography is rather extensive.

Lewis.