Students Under Stress: A Study in the Social Psychology of Adaptation.

This interesting sm[ill]ll [ill]ume reports a study of the behavior of graduate students as they deal with the stress of [ill] "prelim" examinations. David Mechanic's keen observations represent a further development of the important trend in which stress is viewed within the broad context of the real-life behavior of people rather than as a laboratory phenomenon. The author, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, describes real people observed as they deal with a situation whose difficulty is meaningful within the range of normal human experience. His "subjects" are no mere collections of bare endocrines and autonomic structures who do no more than passively respond to their stress. Instead they reveal a rich variety of adaptive devices. Their responses are seen as adaptive processes which shift over time, not as static artifices. These develop, become modified, and are given up as the meaning