The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between constructions of feminine gender identity and experiences of menstrual distress. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to assess the relationship between femininity and PMS. Statistically significant correlations were found between T-scores for femininity on the Bem Sex Role Inventory (Bem, 1978) and total distress scores on the Menstrual Distress Questionnaire (Moos, 1991). Analysis of the qualitative data suggests that women engage in intense premenstrual bodily surveillance, and the data support Ussher, Hunter, and Browne's (2000) findings that the 'PMS self' becomes lived as an identity position in contrast to a 'real' or 'non-PMS sell.' The authors conclude that our biopsychiatric discourse about PMS functions to legitimize traditional constructions of femininity and that future research should conceptualize menstrual distress as both lived experience and social construction.

In contrast to traditional approaches, collaborative approaches to psychological assessment either engage the client throughout the assessment or ask for clients' feedback on the assessor's integrated impressions. The findings are thereby tailored to the clients' worlds. Many collaborative assessors regard the assessment process as transformative or therapeutic in its own right. In this article, we review early and recent literature advocating similar practices, related validity studies, and forms of providing impressions and feedback to clients. We present a brief excerpt of a report from a collaborative assessment and discuss literature on engaging in collaborative assessment within ongoing therapy.

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The aim of this book is 'to provide students with the means to appreciate the potential of the written language and to explore the links between the structures of discourse and the interrelationship between social institutions' (p. xi). In other words, the authors are building up an 'eclectic' model with tools belonging, on the one hand, to the linguistic tradition (the study of the potential of written language), and, on the other hand, to the general field of Discourse Analysis.The book is divided into three parts. The first part ('Style, rhetoric and critical discourse analysis') presents the theoretical background behind the authors' methodology. The authors specify their own approach ('Style, discourse and choice') in relation to prominent linguistic and literary theories (starting from Greek rhetoric, and working through to Jakobson, Halliday, Foucault and Fairclough).One of their main ideas is to call into question the boundaries between Stylistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. In the authors' view, there is a way of taking advantage of both theories by creating a specific framework which could be used profitably to analyse a wide range of texts. This framework is summarized over three pages (pp. 60-2), in which the authors explain the three levels of text analysis:1. 'How to situate the text': first, by studying how the text is linked to its context, then by focusing on 'subject matter, relationship and structure'. 2. 'How to analyse the text': first, by 'positioning writer, reader and character'; second, by 'positioning [it] in time and space'; and then by studying the 'words, images and meaning' as well as the 'sentence structure, rhythm and sound'. 3. 'How to relate the text to culture': this part, which ought to be one of the 221 Book reviews