Neuropsychology

Group

Neuropsychology Unit

Leader

Associate Professor Warrick Brewer

Members

Dr Tina Proffitt, Dr Kelly Allott, Mr John Dileo

Overview

Neuropsychology is undergoing an important transformation in adapting to the challenges of youth psychiatry. Our unit has actively been promoting the evolution of understanding that is required to address the highly dynamic adolescent maturational phase of prefrontal neural connectivity. This involves shifting the focus from more traditional ‘bottom-up’ medical models towards ‘top-down’ frameworks that can more usefully incorporate an understanding of the significant impact of early factors such as cognitive developmental deficits, instability of the emotional environment, including breakdown of family structure, abuse, and the consequent impact upon dysfunctional schema formation and vulnerability for substance abuse. These are all potential key risk indicators for psychopathology.

We have been actively mapping the emotional, psychological and potentially functional and structural imaging deficits that emerge in neurodevelopmental disorders compared to the phase of normal instability that characterises adolescence. Our methods have particular relevance for OYH clients as we provide management plans that map the relative weighting of their developmental trajectories into emerging psychopathology across biological, cognitive, personality and social learning domains.

A common focus for our clinical intervention and for our related research involves mapping disorders in cognition and of emotion regulation for the primary purpose of clients regaining optimum control. A key research focus concerns identification of those who have experienced developmental arrest of prefrontal neural function relative to those who are more compromised in their psychological (cognitive) or environmental (family) function, with particular emphasis on olfactory identification deficits as a proxy measure of disrupted affect regulation capacity.

This hybrid clinical research unit has fostered collaborations with the Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Research & Academic Unit, the University of Melbourne, the Department of Psychiatry at the Austin Hospital, the Brain Research Institute at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, the Monash Medical Centre/School of Behavioral Science, the Royal Children’s Hospital, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and University of Pennsylvania Taste and Smell laboratory. Finally, the Neuropsychology Unit is conducting olfactory and/or cognition collaborations with each OYH-RC research team. The unit model has been highly successful in managing leadership of neuropsychology within youth psychiatry in terms of clinical placement and research supervision, teaching load, number of publications, and research grants.