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(Ed.) Experimental Psychology: A Series Of Broadcast Talks on Recent Research by , , , , , . [New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1955. Pp. xi + 66. $2.75].
This booklet contains six lectures delivered by English psychologists over the British Broadcasting Company network. They deal, in the following order, with perception, adult learning and remembering, motivation, some hypotheses of psychoanalysis, the study of social behavior, and the prospects of experimental psychology. In these clear talks to the laity an attempt was made to use crucial experiments to confirm, contradict, or modify some generalizations. Since the talks were short, each lecturer had to limit the experiments, observations or theories to be described. The psychoanalytic reader may be interested particularly in Farrell's talk on psychoanalysis. Farrell argues that the evidence relating to early development in childhood obtained from analyzed adults is incomplete because of the distortion of memory. Consequently, he argues, non-clinical experimental situations must be the testing ground. He cites some successful and simple experiments which confirmed the connection between unpleasantness (of a word or experience) and forgetting (failure to recall that word or experience), between lack of gratification and search for substitute gratification, etc. The chapter on motivation deals with animals and physiology. The last talk by Oldfield is concerned mainly with perceptual discrimination. This series of talks is a very elementary and incomplete but sound and excellently written introduction to modern experimental psychology.