Adaptation of the Global Examination of Mental State (GEMS) for the Serbian population

“A very limited kind of neuropsychology, appropriate to only a fraction of the world’s population, is presented to the rest of the world as if there could be no other kind of neuropsychology, and as if the education and cultural assumptions on which neuropsychology is based were obviously universals that applied everywhere in the world.” -Matthews (1992) Since the earliest onset of psychological research, all the efforts have been focused on a single sample; most often that which is Western, urban, middle-class and literate. (Chithiramohan et al., 2024). By now we have a detailed account of functioning of such a sample, and endless tools for their assessment as well as therapies tailored to their needs and capabilities. The research in the field was concentrated mainly in North America and Western Europe, and this narrow focus has greatly impoverished our understanding of psychology (Czerwinski-Alley et al., 2024). When neuropsychology specifically is brought into question, the situation is no different, and our understanding of cognition and pathology is consequently partial and biased. In practice, far removed from this uniform conceptualization of function which is prevalent still in literature, neuropsychologists are faced with minority patients from diverse backgrounds, and only then come to understand just how profoundly factors such as culture, language, environment and socioeconomic status influence a person’s functioning and the consequent presentation of potential pathology (Ardila, 2007) This is perhaps most evident when tools and norms from these Western countries are applied to samples which they were not originally developed for. The 1990s slowly bring about a new approach to practice. We see a rising interest in research which addresses the cultural and demographic factors in neuropsychology, with many studies addressing questions of illiteracy, socioeducational factors of neuropsychological performance, norms for different national and cultural groups, cultural differences in assessment and treatment, and cross-cultural variability in cognitive functioning itself. All of these considerations have implications for proper practice in the development of neuropsychological tools, and their potential adaptation and standardization for use in different countries. Test adaptations and standardizations have by now become common practice, but when Serbia is the case there is still an undeniable gap between what is needed and what is available. It was our aim with this project to adapt and eventually standardize a new tool for neuropsychological assessment for the Serbian population, the General Examination of Mental State, hopefully making a small contribution in the task of bridging this gap.