Clinical Neuropsychology of Emotion

Written in an engaging, accessible style, this book synthesizes the growing body of knowledge on the neuropsychology of emotion and identifies practical clinical implications. Yana Suchy offers fresh insights into emotional processing and its role in cognition, daily functioning, and mental health. She reviews available assessment instruments and describes compelling advances in understanding traumatic brain injury, brain disease, and psychopathology.

Organized in four parts, the book begins with a historical overview that sets the stage for current developments in the field. Part II unravels the processes that comprise a single emotional event, from the initial trigger through physiological and psychological responses. Suchy addresses how emotions are communicated and regulated, and what happens when these processes go awry. Part III explores how prevailing patterns of emotional responses---such as mood styles and susceptibility to stress---come together to motivate complex behavioral choices. Chapters in Parts II and III follow a consistent format, beginning with theoretical bases and going on to describe pertinent clinical syndromes, populations, assessment instruments, and diagnostic implications. The concluding section forges links between the clinical neuropsychology of emotion and other relevant areas of research, including temperament and personality, behavioral medicine, stress regulation, and executive functioning. Helpful appendices cross-reference syndromes, populations, and assessment instruments across all of the chapters.

This timely, authoritative work is an essential addition to the professional libraries of neuropsychologists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and health psychologists, and will also be of interest to developmentalists and personality/social psychologists. It will fill an important niche as a graduate-level text.

Yana Suchy, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology and Clinical Neuropsychology Program Director in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. Her professional responsibilities include graduate training, research, and clinical neuropsychological practice. Dr. Suchy's research focuses on understanding the interface among executive, affective, and motor processes, with the long-term goal of developing new methods for detecting subtle, preclinical deficits in executive and emotional control. In line with her research interests, she feels strongly about the need to integrate assessment of affective processes into everyday neuropsychological clinical practice. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society and The Clinical Neuropsychologist, and as an ad hoc reviewer for a number of other journals. Dr. Suchy has published widely in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and neuropsychology textbooks and presents regularly at national and international meetings.