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social interaction system, I found their behaviorally-oriented discussion of systems concepts particularly illuminating.

DiScipio and Vardy's article "Therapeutic Ideology, Personality and Group Loyalty: Behaviorists Versus Analysts" is confusing on several counts. It is difficult to understand what this article is doing in a book on the behavioral treatment of mental illness. A question- naire was used to differentiate personality preferences of behavior therapists and analytically-oriented therapists! There were no reliability or validity checks on any opinions expressed by respondents.

Hollander, Plutchik, and Landau's study of affect changes in mental patients in a behavior modification program has some serious flaws. There is weak reliability and validity for affect measures, and the suitability of Plutchik's theory for application in the present context is unconvincingly demonstrated. The empirical data appear confounded in many ways, one being a lack of double-blind controls (especially important in judging emotional functioning). Study of mood changes during behavior modification seems an unusually creative and worth- while choice of research areas, and merits a better research design than that used.

Modeling and reinforcement techniques with hospitalized psychotics, by Glickman, Di- Scipio, and Hollander, is a fair study with good operational definitions of social interest, quite relevant to the purposes of the study. But the relatively small amount of data scarcely warranted so much statistical analysis and discussion.

All in all, this is a disappointing book with a few oases of enlightenment, but not enough to justify purchase.

RAYMOND A . U L M E R Departments of Psychiatry and Human Be- havior, Drew Postgraduate Medical School; Martin Luther King, Jr. General Hospital; and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90059

TYMCHUK, A. J., Behavior Modification with Children: A clinical training manual Springfield, IL: C.C Thomas, 1974. 133 Pp. $9.95 cloth, $6.95 paper.

In the preface, Tymchuk indicates that his book should be used to train future clinicians to use behavior modification procedures with children, and also as a training manual for parents. This book contains a brief history of the use of behavioral principles, means of collecting and graphing data, a description of basic principles, suggestions for program implementation, case studies successfully using behavior modification procedures, suggestions for parent im- plementation, and a list of cautions that should be exercised. Within the chapters the author suggests a variety of assignments the reader should conduct in the home or clinic, and one of the appendices contains an extensive series of questions pertaining to information within the text. The final appendix contains a glossary of behavioral terms.

There are numerous difficulties with the book and I cannot recommend its use either for future clinicians or parents. Problems include presentation, insufficient attention to the pragmatics of applying behavioral procedures, and technical inaccuracies.

One difficulty with the presentation is the author's tendency to use terms before defining them. Examples of such terms include baseline, shaping, operant conditioning, behavior modification, secondary reinforcement, consequences, social model, and generalization. Some of the terms are defined later in the text or in the Glossary, whereas others are not. In any event, the novice would probably find it easier to read the book if the author had defined

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the terms when they were first used. Tymchuk also has a tendency to be careless with behavioral language. For example, he talks about eliciting swearing, and extinguishing behavior with punishment. The term eliciting should be reserved for respondent behaviors, and the term extinguish refers to a process of decreasing the level of a behavior by ignoring it. At some points I found either the explanation of a case study (e.g., p. 41), or the steps to solving the problems (e.g., chap. 7) unclear. Overall, the author fails to present his material in a flowing manner. Transitional statements from one idea to another are often missing, headings sometimes contain information unrelated to their content, and his sentence structure is often clumsy in an attempt to be folksy.

One of the most peculiar aspects of the book is that the author mentions ideas foreign to the behavioral approach with a minimal amount of explanation. For example, he states that positive reinforcement might spoil a child (p. 76) without defining spoil or indicating how the problem might occur or be avoided. Elsewhere (p. 77) he treats the notions of hate and love in a similar, casual manner.

Tymchuk does an excellent job of justifying the importance of measuring behavior and the usefulness of graphed data. Unfortunately, he gives too little attention to the pragmatics of attaining the data. He describes only two types of measurement techniques frequency and duration recording. In his discussion of frequency recording, he fails to mention devices such as golf counters and shopping-market counters which are useful for acquiring frequency records. He does not indicate that duration recording is unrealistic in all but the most unusual circumstances and lhat momentary time sampling (Kubany & Sloggett, 1973) is a reasonable substitute.

The author makes several statements whose accuracy is questionable. He claims, for example, that the best way to eliminate screaming is to ignore it, and that punishment techniques such as time-out are less effective (p. 25). My own understanding of the literature and personal experience leads me to believe that the opposite is true. He also states that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement (p. 25) or punishment (p. 26), but gives no references in support of such statements. My understanding is that positive reinforcement is more likely to be superior in its side effects than its direct effects and that situational variables and target behaviors must be taken into account before reaching such a conclusion on direct effects. He also states that a behavior modification procedure might be ineffective because the behavior has become strongly "embedded" as a part of a child's behavioral repertoire (p. 33). A more suitable explanation might make reference to the notion of schedules of reinforcement rather than the amount of time the behavior has been a problem.

The section of the book causing me the most difficulty involves his questions on the material. He often used terms (e.g., spontaneous recovery, operational definition, continuous reinforcements schedule) in a question, although I cannot recall seeing such terms in the text. I found the phrasing of some of the questions confusing, e.g.: Which of the following is not a rule for using positive reinforcement?

a. The effectiveness of a reinforcers depends on its magnitude. b. Allow the child to sample the reinforcer ahead of time. c. The kind of reinforcer used. d. A reinforcer should be used on a simple behavior. e. None of the above.

On several other questions I felt that there was more than one correct answer or disagreed with the author's answer.

There are several good aspects to the book. The author points out that parents frequently focus on a child's misbehaviors, rather than his good behaviors and provides a convincing argument for identifying the adaptive behaviors that a child does or should perform. He also stresses the importance of having parents proceed in small steps and analyzing the compo-

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nents of a task to be learned. He makes the suggestion that parents practice the use of praise so that they will sound convincing when they later employ it with their children. He frequently summarizes previous content in an effective manner and some of his outside exercises shape the reader's learning process. He also provides some good task analyses of child behaviors and suggests some excellent reinforcers. Tymchuk presents a good section on weaning children from extrinsic to intrinsic reinforcers.

In conclusion, one must ferret for the positive aspects of the book and, in my opinion, the search is not worth the effort that is required.

SAUL AXELROD College of Education Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122

REFERENCE Kubany, E. S., & Sloggett, B. B. Coding procedure for teachers. Journal of Applied Behavior

Analysis, 1973, 6, 339-344.

GOODMAN, D. S. IN COLLABORATION WITH MAULTSBY, M. C., Emotional Well-Being through Behavior Training. Springfield, IL: C. C Thomas, 1974 xx + 230 Pp. $6.50.

Cognitive behavior therapy is generally defined as the therapeutic effort to change the cognitions of the patient with the ultimate goal of having the changed cognitions act as mediators of changed behavior. This simple definition is the tie that unites a group whose ranks include Beck, Ellis, Lazarus, Goldfried, D'Zurilla, Maultsby, and Meichenbaum, among others. Beginning in the 1960s, cognitive behavior therapy attained a rapid popularity, and may be considered, in many ways, as the most contemporary approach on today's therapeutic scene-- the approach that the au eourant graduate student knows is the one that is giving the clearest definition to the rather amorphous shape of behavior therapy in the 1970s. This sort of popularity leads almost inevitably to a branching from the main theoretical trunk, and with the branching, a relabeling of the theory to express some true and ultimate aspect that has been missed by the old label.

It is perhaps fitting that Ellis' Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), in many ways the theoreti- cal and chronological foundation stone of cognitive behavior therapy, has suffered this branching and relabeling. The new label is Rational Behavior Training (RBT), and the approach is given exposition in a book written by David Goodman in collaboration with Maxie Maultsby, the founder of the new approach. Ellis himself graciously gives the new label his seal of approval in a brief foreword, citing the limitations of RET as a label to describe RET's educational applications, and also the fact that RET is clearly a mode of behavior therapy. A new label perhaps, but there is little apparent difference between RET and RBT.

The book itself is generally well written with brief, readable chapters. The writing, how- ever, is from the vantage point of a nonprofessional (David Goodman is a public relations man and a science writer), and there is some strident hyperbole and salesmanship that may annoy the professional reader. Also, there are some lapses in clarity that hinder understanding of the material.

The book is organized into four sections. The first section, labeled "The Methodology of RBT," consists of 10 chapters covering such topics as the discovery of self-talk, homework, the rational therapy group, and rational alternatives. Among the chapters here which I found most useful, were those on "Rational Self Analysis (Homework)" and "Rational Alterna- t ives."