Medical psychology, or Medicopsychology, is the application of psychological principles to the practice of medicine, primarily drug-oriented, for both physical and mental disorders.
Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.
Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology that is concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology often focus on how injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive and behavioral functions.
Rehabilitation of sensory and cognitive function typically involves methods for retraining neural pathways or training new neural pathways to regain or improve neurocognitive functioning that have been diminished by disease or trauma. The main objective outcome for rehabilitation is to assist in regaining physical abilities and improving performance. Three common neuropsychological problems treatable with rehabilitation are attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), concussion, and spinal cord injury. Rehabilitation research and practices are a fertile area for clinical neuropsychologists, rehabilitation psychologists, and others.
Neuropsychological tests are specifically designed tasks that are used to measure a psychological function known to be linked to a particular brain structure or pathway. Tests are used for research into brain function and in a clinical setting for the diagnosis of deficits. They usually involve the systematic administration of clearly defined procedures in a formal environment. Neuropsychological tests are typically administered to a single person working with an examiner in a quiet office environment, free from distractions. As such, it can be argued that neuropsychological tests at times offer an estimate of a person's peak level of cognitive performance. Neuropsychological tests are a core component of the process of conducting neuropsychological assessment, along with personal, interpersonal and contextual factors.
Clinical neuropsychology is a sub-field of psychology concerned with the applied science of brain-behaviour relationships. Clinical neuropsychologists use this knowledge in the assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and or rehabilitation of patients across the lifespan with neurological, medical, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions, as well as other cognitive and learning disorders. The branch of neuropsychology associated with children and young people is pediatric neuropsychology.
Neuropsychological assessment was traditionally carried out to assess the extent of impairment to a particular skill and to attempt to determine the area of the brain which may have been damaged following brain injury or neurological illness. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, location of space-occupying lesions can now be more accurately determined through this method, so the focus has now moved on to the assessment of cognition and behaviour, including examining the effects of any brain injury or neuropathological process that a person may have experienced.
Ian John Deary OBE, FBA, FRSE, FMedSci is a Scottish psychiatrist known for work in the fields of intelligence, cognitive ageing, cognitive epidemiology, and personality.
Edith F. Kaplan was an American psychologist. She was a pioneer of neuropsychological tests and did most of her work at the Boston VA Hospital. Kaplan is known for her promotion of clinical neuropsychology as a specialty area in psychology. She examined brain-behavioral relationships in aphasia, apraxia, developmental issues in clinical neuropsychology, as well as normal and abnormal aging. Kaplan helped develop a new method of assessing brain function with neuropsychological assessment, called "The Boston Process Approach."
Cecil Randy Reynolds is an American psychology professor best known for his work in psychological testing and assessment.
Kenneth M. Heilman is an American behavioral neurologist He is considered one of the fathers of modern-day behavioral neurology.
Raymond S. Dean was an American psychologist who was the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Neuropsychology and Professor of Psychology at Ball State University.
Elizabeth Kerr Warrington FRS is a British neuropsychologist specialised in the study of dementia. She holds a PhD in Psychology visual processing and is now an emeritus professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London. She formerly worked as the Head of the Department of Neuropsychology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where she is also a member of the Dementia Research Centre. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986.
Shlomo Bentin, August 26, 1946 – July 13, 2012) was an Israeli neuropsychologist and recipient of the 2012 Israel Prize in psychology. Bentin was a professor of Psychology and Education, and a member of the Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
The Planning, Attention-Arousal, Simultaneous and Successive (PASS) theory of intelligence, first proposed in 1975, and later elaborated by Das, Naglieri & Kirby (1994) and Das, Kar & Parrila, (1996) challenges g-theory on the grounds that the brain is made up of interdependent, but separate, functional systems. Neuroimaging studies and clinical studies of individuals with brain lesions make it clear that the brain is modularized; for example, damage to a very specific area of the left temporal lobe will impair the production of spoken and written language. Damage to an adjacent area will have the opposite impact, preserving the individual's ability to produce, but not understand speech and text.
Ernest "Mark" Mahone is a pediatric neuropsychologist.
Professor Susan Rossell is a British researcher based at Swinburne University of Technology specialising in Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging. Originally from Nottingham, UK; she now resides in Melbourne, Australia. Her research on the neuropsychology of schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder is internationally recognised.
George Schlager Welsh, an early personality researcher, was best known for his research on creativity. Having a diverse range of experiences in psychopathology and personality assessment during World War II times, he dedicated his career to developing and utilizing personality assessment tools.
Jerome Sarris is a NHMRC Clinical Research Fellow and Professor of Integrative Mental Health at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is also an honorary head of ARCADIA, a specialised nutraceutical and lifestyle medicine research group in Melbourne, Australia, and an honorary Principal Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Department of Psychiatry.
Robert A. Stern is professor of neurology, neurosurgery, anatomy, and neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine, where he is also director of clinical research for the BU Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center. From 2010 to 2019, he was the director of the Clinical Core of the BU Alzheimer's Disease Center.