Characteristics of auditory agnosia in a child with severe traumatic brain injury: a case report

We present a case that is unusual in many respects from other documented incidences of auditory agnosia, including the mechanism of injury, age of the individual, and location of neurological insult. The clinical presentation is one of disturbance in the perception of spoken language, music, pitch, emotional prosody, and temporal auditory processing in the absence of significant deficits in the comprehension of written language, expressive language production, or peripheral auditory function. Furthermore, the patient demonstrates relatively preserved function in other aspects of audition such as sound localization, voice recognition, and perception of animal noises and environmental sounds. This case study demonstrates that auditory agnosia is possible following traumatic brain injury in a child, and illustrates the necessity of assessment with a wide variety of auditory stimuli to fully characterize auditory agnosia in a single individual.     

Processing strategy moderates the cultivation effect

This study tested the hypothesis that processing strategy moderates the effect of television viewing on social perceptions (cultivation effect). One hundred twenty‐two male and female students provided estimates of the prevalence of crime, occupations, affluence, and marital discord under one of three conditions. Some participants were induced to process heuristically (heuristic group) through instructions to provide their estimates spontaneously with little elaboration. Other participants were induced to process systematically (systematic group) through an accuracy motivation/task importance manipulation. A third (control) group received instructions to simply answer the questions. The results indicated that processing strategy moderated the cultivation effect such that cultivation effects were noted in the heuristic and control groups but not in the systematic group. These results are consistent with the notion that the cultivation effect can be explained in part as the result of heuristic processing through lack of source discounting, and they provide support for the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects.     

An Investigation of Psychology Staffing in Australian Metropolitan Acute Public Hospitals

Psychology is one component of the multidisciplinary services provided to patients in acute public hospitals, with research demonstrating that psychological intervention significantly enhances clinical outcomes for patients across a range of health issues. Despite the increasingly important role that psychologists play in Australian hospitals, there remains a lack of information available about staff levels, discipline structures, and clinical activity for psychological services within acute hospital settings. The most recent Australian data about hospital‐based psychology services was collected 20 years ago. The current study provides updated information from a survey of 15 Australian metropolitan, acute public hospitals: presenting and critically reviewing staffing configurations and models of service delivery. Results suggest that: (a) hospitals employ a highly skilled workforce at a rate of 0.16 full‐time equivalent psychology staff for every 10 hospital beds; (b) psychologists have a viable career pathway within the hospital‐based health sector; (c) role diversity is common, with the primary focus varying as a function of position level; (d) neuropsychology staffing requires urgent attention to address significant delays in access to services; and (e) public hospitals actively contribute to current and future workforce development through supervision, research, and training. The implications of these results for the future of psychological services in Australian healthcare are discussed.     

Spelling dyslexia: A form of cross-cuing

A patient with spelling dyslexia maintained the ability to write, spell, and pronounce spelled nonsense words and words that require knowledge of orthographic rules of language. He was unable to perform grapheme-phoneme conversions except after naming the letter involved. We propose that he uses a letter-naming strategy to circumvent the disconnection of visual areas from the area of visual word images and that his letter-naming strategy represents a compensatory cross-cuing strategy.