Psychology for the MRCPsych (2nd edn). Marcus Munafo, London: Arnold, 2002, 198pp. £18.99 PB, ISBN: 0-340-80911-6

This is a book written for trainee psychiatrists by a psychologist experienced in preparing candidates for the Part I examination. He finds that candidates are unhappy when presented with a heavy-weight introductory psychology textbook, and this text serves as an introduction, a glossary and a source of multiple-choice questions to help revision.

My main concern probably reflects the structure of the MRCPsych exam as much as this book. Conceptually similar material seems to be dotted, almost arbitrarily, through several sections. So while learning, modelling, conditioning etc. appear as ‘basic psychology’, social learning theory pops up without cross-reference in ‘social psychology’ (p. 83) and again under ‘human development’ (p. 124) and learnt fears are treated elsewhere (p. 155). There are also lacunae. For example, for psychiatrists to understand intelligence quotient (IQ) assessments, it might help them to know that two-thirds of the population have IQs between 90 and 110. Indeed, this may be far more important than being able to define IQ. The number of self-report questions also seems unbalanced: the Social section (28 pp) has 35 questions and Assessment (12 pp) 65.

I admire the author’s bravery in attempting to cover the whole of psychology, but there are niggles such as a fundamentally incorrect definition of IQ (p. 106) and ordinal scales (p. 107), an idiosyncratic definition of split-half reliability (p. 102), the claim that there are only two sub-scales in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (p. 106; there are 11 subscales, best combined to yield scores on four ability factors) and an idiosyncratic reading of the behaviour-genetic literature (p. 127), which ignores adoption studies. Likewise, readers may think that behaviour-genetic designs are limited to simple additive models (p. 123), which is incorrect. This book should surely present mainstream opinion. There are also a few incorrectly-spelt authors’ names and some terms appear to be used without being defined (e.g., p. 102).

This book is well-written, the index is good, and many of the succinct definitions and sample questions are likely to help trainees’revision. However, there are problems as noted above and the structure of the book makes for a disjointed read.