Old and New Neuropsychology Make a Mixed Bag

Abstract

The second edition of Clinician's Guide to Neuropsychological Assessment is intended to be a graduate level textbook dealing with the practice of neuropsychology. The number of chapters has been expanded considerably, compared to the first edition of this book. Most of the new contributions are fairly up to date with the recent literature and pertain to areas of applied neuropsychology that have shown considerable growth over the past few years. In contrast, many of the purportedly revised chapters that were also present in the first edition are disappointing. For example, the chapter on “Principles of Neuropsychological Interpretation” appears to be an almost verbatim reprint of its 1994 counterpart and fails to review any of the literature that has since then developed with regard to issues such as reliability of change in test scores (Sawrie et al., 1996), effects of financial incentives (Binder & Rohling, 1996), or construct validity of commonly used tests (Goldman et al., 1996).