Programme

This course will provide students with an introduction to clinical cognitive neuroscience. In the mid-1980s this project started to influence psychiatry. Pioneering exemplars of a psychiatry driven by cognitive neuroscience include: Baron-Cohen, Frith and Leslie’s hypothesis that high-functioning autism can be explained in terms of deficits to the mechanisms underlying mindreading; Frith’s definition of schizophrenia as late-onset autism; Ellis and Young’s neuropsychological account of the delusional misidentifications; and Blair’s explanation of psychopathic behavior as due to the absence or malfunctioning of a violence inhibition mechanism. Since then the hope has grown that psychiatry can cease to rely exclusively on the signs and symptoms of clinical phenomenology to finally become a clinical cognitive neuroscience, i.e., a research program that conceives psychiatric disorders as dysfunctions of neurocomputational mechanisms.

Core Documentation

Per i frequentanti:
materiali forniti durante il corso.

Per i non frequentanti:
M. Marraffa e C. Meini, L’identità personale, Carocci, Roma 2016.
P. Fonagy, G. Gergely, E.L. Jurist, M. Target, Regolazione affettiva, mentalizzazione e sviluppo del sé, Cortina, Milano 2005 (solo capp. 1, 3, 4 e 7).

Type of evaluation

oral exam