Latest Pedagogical Preprints

Stress is often discussed as if it were inherently pathological, purely psychological, and eliminable through willpower or environmental change. Health psychology, however, emphasizes that stress is an evolutionarily ancient, physiologically instantiated, and generally adaptive response that supports survival by coordinating rapid behavioral and metabolic reconfiguration. This manuscript develops a set of lecture notes that treat stress, distress, crisis, trauma, and suicidal behavior as points along a continuum of increasing dysregulation---that is, increasingly costly ``failure modes'' of an otherwise protective system. Beginning with foundational definitions, the paper integrates autonomic nervous system dynamics, hypothalamic--pituitary--adrenal (HPA) axis physiology, and cognitive appraisal mechanisms to clarify why stress cannot be eliminated, why it is not merely ``in the mind,'' and why it commonly generalizes across life domains. We then propose a conceptual sequence: adaptive stress as problem-focused mobilization; distress as the failure of available coping strategies; crisis as disruption of core expectations and world-models; trauma as unresolved or repeatedly reactivated crisis leading to persistent prediction errors and hypervigilance; and suicide as a potential end-stage solution attempt when suffering becomes appraised as inescapable. The framework is situated within the health psychology perspective that focuses on population-level determinants and prevention through systemic redesign, particularly in contexts of evolutionary mismatch where symbolic and chronic stressors outpace the recovery capacities shaped by ancestral environments. Practical implications are offered for education, work design, social support infrastructures, and time-sensitive suicide prevention strategies.

Visuospatial disorders occupy a central position in neuropsychology because they expose a fundamental fact about the visual system: seeing is not equivalent to the registration of photons on the retina, but rather a multi-stage construction that integrates sensory coding, selective attention, spatial representation, memory, and action planning. This paper develops lecture-based notes on visuospatial disorders, using clinical syndromes as a framework for understanding visual processing and consciousness. After reviewing the functional anatomy and temporal dynamics of visual pathways---from retina to subcortical relays (e.g., lateral geniculate nucleus and pulvinar) and onward to primary visual cortex and distributed cortical streams---we examine major disorders that dissociate visual sensation, recognition, and awareness. Emphasis is placed on unilateral spatial neglect as a disorder of spatial attention and representation, visual agnosias as impairments of object recognition (classically linked to ventral-stream dysfunction), and blindsight as a striking dissociation in which visually guided behavior can occur without reported awareness, often following lesions of primary visual cortex. The discussion integrates bedside and laboratory assessment methods (copying tasks, line bisection and cancellation tests, forced-choice paradigms), lesion patterns and laterality, prognostic factors following stroke, and rehabilitation approaches including strategy training and prism adaptation. Beyond clinical relevance, these syndromes provide empirical constraints on theories of consciousness by demonstrating that awareness depends on recurrent and distributed processing rather than a single ``visual center.'' The paper concludes with implications for neuropsychological assessment, patient education, and public health contexts where cerebrovascular disease is prevalent.