{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01978319783197832, 'fraction_numerical': 0.013550135501355014, 'mean_word_length': 5.2453468697123515, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Peter Halligan: an appreciation

Peter Halligan, the co-founder of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, is stepping down as co-editor after 22 years. Peter obtained his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Philosophy at University College Dublin in 1979, and went on to secure an MA (Hons) in Philosophy in 1981, and a post-graduate Diploma (1st Class Hons) in Clinical and Experimental Psychology in 1984. In 1985, he was offered a position as a clinical research psychologist at the Rivermead Rehabilitation Centre in Oxford, which in turn led to a PhD in neuropsychology at Oxford Brookes University. In 1987, he joined the Neuropsychology Unit (Directed by John Marshall and Freda Newcombe) at Oxford University. He was soon to establish himself as an independent researcher contributing landmark studies in visual neglect and related disorders. In 1999, he moved to take up a chair in Cardiff’s School of Psychology and worked with the late Hadyn Ellis—internationally recognised for his work on face recognition and later his ground-breaking work with Andy Young (York) on the genesis of delusion formation and the emergence of cognitive neuropsychiatry. Peter subsequently took up influential positions in the university promoting interdisciplinary studies, later moving to be Chief Executive to the Learned Society of Wales and, most recently, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Welsh Government. It was in the early 1990s when Peter developed his interests in a wider set of phenomena which inhabited the borderland—or as many thought at the time, the no man’s land— between neuropsychology and psychiatry including visual hallucinations, supernumerary phantom limbs, reduplication, somatoparaphrenia, hysterical conversion, phantom limbs and illness deception (malingering). This period witnessed the gestation, birth and early flourishing of cognitive neuropsychiatry as a discipline, nurtured by the launch of this journal and publications such as “Method in Madness” a collection of case studies compiled with John Marshall in the same auspicious year, 1996. Thanks to Peter, the journal has played a pioneering role in establishing and shaping cognitive neuropsychiatry as a vibrant sub-discipline within cognitive neuroscience. The field and journal were recognised in the ESRC international benchmarking review of UK Psychology in 2010, which concluded that it was “the best in the world in providing new insights into the nature of neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric impairments, with implications for treatment”. Coming to the present, we are pleased that Cognitive Neuropsychiatry article full-text downloads are increasing year on year, with a 5% increase in 2017 from 2016 and we are on track to maintain that level this year. Thanks to an efficient production team, the time between acceptance of an article and publication is now down to an average of only 1.9 weeks. We are pleased to say that Peter will remain on the editorial board and we remain indebted to his decades of work that has left the journal in very good health. As we change editors, it is perhaps time to reflect on the possible future for cognitive neuropsychiatry as a field. Probably one of the most notable changes since this journal was founded has been the increasing influence of computational psychiatry and Bayesian accounts of neurocognition. Debates about their possible scope and utility have already been raging but these approaches clearly have huge promise. We look forward to seeing how this field develops. We have also seen an increased interest in better integrating the nuances of psychiatric phenomenology and lived experience with the science of neuropsychology and we hope this will