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Within acute mental health settings, pro re nata (p.r.n.) 'as required' medication is a widely used adjunct to regular treatment plans, and is administered at the discretion of a registered nurse. However, there is concern that some orders may benefit staff more than patients by providing a 'quick fix' to compensate for inadequate therapeutic programmes. Previous authors assert that p.r.n. medication administration should not be the first line of action, but should be used when other less invasive interventions such as de-escalation, talking, or separation from the group are unsuccessful. This project explored the occurrence of p.r.n. medication administration and the type of alternative therapeutic interventions that are documented as accompanying its administration. A retrospective 1-month chart audit was undertaken for a cohort of inpatients in a 20-bed mental health facility attached to a regional hospital in New South Wales, Australia. Forty-seven patients (73.4%) received p.r.n. medication at least once, with a total of 309 doses of p.r.n. medication administered during this time. There were wide variations in the documented rationales, and for nearly three-quarters (73%) of p.r.n. medication administrations, no other therapeutic intervention was documented as occurring prior to administration.

Two experiments focus on Thai tone perception by native speakers of tone languages (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), a pitch-accent (Swedish), and a nontonal (English) language. In Experiment 1, there was better auditory-only and auditory-visual discrimination by tone and pitch-accent language speakers than by nontone language speakers. Conversely and counterintuitively, there was better visual-only discrimination by nontone language speakers than tone and pitch-accent language speakers. Nevertheless, visual augmentation of auditory tone perception in noise was evident for all five language groups. In Experiment 2, involving discrimination in three fundamental frequency equivalent auditory contexts, tone and pitch-accent language participants showed equivalent discrimination for normal Thai speech, filtered speech, and violin sounds. In contrast, nontone language listeners had significantly better discrimination for violin sounds than filtered speech and in turn speech. Together the

The relationship between processing of speech and music was explored here via the linguistic vehicle of lexical tone. People with amusia have been found to be impaired on linguistic tasks; we examined whether absolute pitch (AP) possessors have an advantage on linguistic tasks. Participants were 3 groups of monolingual Australian-English speakers: non-AP musicians (musically-trained individuals who did not possess AP), AP musicians (musically-trained individuals who were AP possessors), and non-musicians (no musical training). Perceptual discrimination was tested in an AX same–different task for lexical tones presented in three contexts: normal Thai speech, low-pass filtered speech tones, and violin, with processing level manipulated via variation of the interstimulus interval (ISI). Non-musicians showed attenuated pitch discrimination of tones in speech, suggesting speech specialisation. On the other hand, all musicians showed greater accuracy, faster reaction times and less variation in accuracy across stimulus types than non-musicians. Importantly, AP musicians showed greater accuracy than non-AP musicians in the speech context, implying a domain-general advantage due to AP. However, speech-violin accuracy correlations for AP musicians were almost zero at the longer ISI, suggesting less commonality of mechanisms during more extensive processing. Results are discussed in terms of the role of AP in tone language perception.

Experimental hand pollinations have revealed that the Australian proteaceous shrub Grevillea barklyana is fully self-compatible, although one study suggested that when both self-and outcross pollen were presented to different flowers on the same inflorescence significantly greater seed set resulted from the outcrossed flowers. This study used single-locus electrophoretic surveys of maternal plants and their progeny arrays to test the prediction that this apparent 'preference' for outcross pollen would produce high levels of outcrossing within natural populations. We found instead that plants within three of four populations were almost completely selfed. Outcrossing rates (t) in each of these populations (based on the progeny arrays of a minimum of nine plants) ranged from 0.07 0.03 to only 0.33 0.08 and showed little variation among years, ranging from 0.07 0.03 to 0.10 0.03 for a population sampled in each of two breeding seasons. Furthermore, examination of the progeny arrays from plants in the most intensively studied population revealed virtually no exchange of genes between immediately adjacent plants. Three pairs of alternative homozygotes were near neighbours (separated by less than 2 m) and yet detectable outcrosses comprised only seven of the 108 seeds sampled. In contrast, the fourth population of G. barklyana appeared highly outcrossed (t =0.85±0.2) which is typical of the realized mating system reported for other Australian Proteaceae. These data show that the realized mating system may vary widely among populations and may often be less than optimal. The occurrence of very low outcrossing rates within some populations may reflect the presence of introduced pollinators or other disturbances.

Implications are discussed regarding impaired emotional prosody in DAT, and the utility of objective acoustic measures in revealing subtle deficits and overcoming methodological inconsistencies is emphasized. Further research is critical in advancing our understanding of this pervasive disorder and is important, clinically, in the provision of specific interventions.

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