29, April, 2015
In the social cognition neuropsychology we learn a lot of things about social cognition. Any aspect of mental life can be analyzed at three levels: sociocultural, psychological, and biophysical. Sociocultural looks at whole groups of people like society, cultures, and institutions; whereas psychological studies only an individual’s mental state. Biophysical studies mainly brains and other physical substrate of sociocultural and psychological. Psychological links sociocultural and biophysical. Cognitive psychology is concerned with how the brain functions and it links psychological level to the biophysical level. Social neuroscience focuses on social aspects of cognition like emotions and motivation. In the nineteenth century physiological researched focused on animal research and this began in the 1870s. The researchers wanted to get a better understating of physiological substrates of basic behavior processes. In the middle of the twentieth century boomed a rise in neuropsychology. Neuropsychology is based on behavioral analysis of brain damage patients and tries to use the analysis to establish linkages between sites of the brain damage and behavioral deficiencies. In 1955 the first paper on patient HM was written. HM was a young man who suffered through epilepsy. The surgeons carved out a piece of his medial temporal lobe and the treatment was successful. HM did not have epilepsy anymore but the back fall on this procedure was that HM lost his memory. This patient got neuropsychology going and got the Sloan Foundation in 1963 started where they studied various aspects of the brain and its structure. You can break down neurology into two categories: neuroanatomy which studies the structure of the brain, and neurophysiology which studies the function. Neuroscience has three levels: molecular, cellular, and systems. In neuroscience you are still doing biology until you get to behavioral level where you think about function. Gazzanga...