94

The book is organized into three sections, on face-to-face interactions in early infancy, play interactions in older infants and toddlers, and on methodology. A valuable applied contribution from the first section is Field’s painstaking analysis of the ‘affective displays’ - the smiles, laughs, frowns, and cries - of high-risk infants as observed in early interactions with their mothers. Thus, infants born before term with respiratory distress syndrome smile less and frown and cry more in face-to-face interactions at 4 months of age than controls. Their heart rates are higher and they avert their gaze more often. Useful hints are given as to how parents might modify their contribution to the interaction so as to make it more rewarding. In the,second section Demos reports a developmental study of facial expressions in infants and toddlers. The study was stimulated by the belief that facial expressions in young children are the clearest and most precise indicators of emotional states, and it is interesting that specific facial movements are patterned in an adult way even in the earliest years; though not, perhaps, surprising, for it is on this that communication depends. The last section is methodological and includes a carefully thought out essay by Kaye on philosophy and methodology in the microanalysis of behaviour.

Emotion and Early Interaction is essentially a state-of-the-art report on current American research in the area; a book principally for those with relevant specialist interests. It provides a very useful overview and a firm basis for the simpler and more general statement that will perhaps one day bring the fruits of this research to a wider audience.

R.F.DREWE-M’ EHD 00527

Maternal Bonding W. Sluckin, M. Herbert and A. Sluckin Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983 102 pages, f3.95 or f12.50

The concept of bonding has a rather odd status within perinatal medicine. For while it has been very useful in focusing attention on the social and psychological needs of parents and their newborns, it hardly stands up to a sustained scientific examination. In this little book, which is an expansion of an earlier paper in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the authors take a critical look at the concept of bonding largely from the stance of developmental psychology. They provide a useful summary of much of the recent debate in a readable form and the book ought to find a place in the training of medical and nursing staff for neonatal units and more generally in perinatal medicine. However, it would have been more valuable for this purpose had it said more about the practical aspects of psychologi- cal care in the perinatal period and had it been better informed about recent research. In particular, it fails to deal adequately with the work on parent-child interaction in specific situations such as after a cesarian section or the special difficulties of relating to a very small or sick baby.

MARTIN RICHARDS