From Individual to Collective Behaviour in Social Insects, Jacques M. Pasteels, Jean-Louis Deneubourg (Eds.). Birkhauser Verlag, Basel (1987), 433

from laboratory simulations to complex social events like urban riots. The preface also declares a difference between this set of readings and others in its acknowledgment of the importance of cognitive factors in human aggression; a focus which has indeed been sadly lacking in most American texts of the seventies and early eighties. These modest aims and careful reservations deserve a warm welcome. The individual chapters reflect the cautions and reservations with varying degrees of success. Perhaps the least good match is to be found in the chapter by Seymour & Norma Feshbach in which they treat the labelling and identification of 'aggressive responses' as non-problematic and in their schematic model acknowledge only 'anger' as the precursor of such responses. In this chapter they describe an intervention programme in which they attempted to reduce children's aggression. Aggression was measured by analysing videos of the children's play with toys 'likely to elicit aggressive behavior' and the intervention programme consisted of teaching cognitive skills related to fantasy. They report minimal support for their original hypothesis that fantasy training would be effective in reducing aggressive behaviour. Other intervention studies are reported in the chapter by Linz et al. on mitigating the influence of violence on television and sexual violence in the media. The studies described show some success in modifying attitudes by a three-stage process in which subjects are first prepared for the effect that violent and pornographic films may have on their attitudes, are then shown such films and are finally given a debriefing session in which the issues are explored. The editors themselves contribute perhaps the most controversial chapter in which they advocate 'negative consequation' or punishment as a general technique for 'the control of aggression', basing their argument on a varied set of data studies of children referred to clinics, biological mechanisms in animals, demographic studies of recidivism after punishment and a somewhat ingenuous cross-cultural comparison of the incidence of violent behaviour in the Japanese and Samoan communities in Hawaii. While the three chapters described above are directed relatively explicitly towards techniques for the control of aggressive behaviour, the remaining three are concerned with the elucidation of particular issues central to the understanding of the phenomenology of aggression. In one, Novaco looks at anger as a component of aggressive interaction; in the second, Taylor describes the importance of cognitive factors in laboratory simulations of aggressive behaviour and points out that, even under the influence of alcohol, aggressive responses are governed by the meanings and interpretations subjects make of the situation they find themselves in. In the third Short discusses the extent to which social control can be interpreted as aggression. As a whole, the readings present some novel approaches which would be useful to specialists in the area of human aggression. In addition the book may serve as a valuable adjunct to postgraduate courses concerned with human aggression.