Cara Wong

• BSc(Hons), MClinNeuro, PhD
• Medical Professional at National Acoustic Laboratories

The aims of this study were to explore the social capital of Australian adolescents who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) and their parents, and investigate its relationship with individual child or family characteristics, language, literacy, and psychosocial outcomes. Participants of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairment (L...

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) are at higher risk of developing mental health problems. This study reports on the parent and teacher ratings of emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) in 5-year old DHH children. It explores the similarities and differences between informants, and the risk and protective factors associated with...

The study explored the social capital of Australian adolescents who were deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) and their parents, and investigated the relationship between social capital and individual characteristics, language, literacy, and psychosocial outcomes. Sixteen adolescents (ages 11-14 years) and 24 parents enrolled in the Longitudinal Outcomes...

This article reports on the psychosocial development and factors influencing outcomes of 5-year-old children with cochlear implants (CIs) or hearing aids (HAs). It further examines differences between children with CIs and HAs with similar levels of hearing loss. Data were collected as part of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impa...

Objective: The aims of this paper were to report on the global psychosocial functioning of 5-year-old DHH children and examine the risk and protective factors that predict outcomes. Design: A cross-sectional analysis of data collected from a prospective, population-based longitudinal study. Study sample: Parents/caregivers of 356 children comp...

The internet and social media have fast become an everyday aspect of adolescents’ lives. Online participation may increase social capital and be particularly beneficial for individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH), as it provides an alternative method to communicate, interact with others and access information. However, reduced levels of l...

Repetition blindness (RB) is a failure to detect both instances of two identical stimuli presented in close temporal proximity. It is due to an inability to form separate episodic tokens for a repeated stimulus, resulting in a single conscious representation. In three experiments, participants identified two targets presented simultaneously in diff...

The aim of this study was to investigate the predictive and moderating effects of HEXACO personality factors, in addition to theory of planned behavior (TPB) variables, on fruit and vegetable consumption. American college students (N = 1036) from 24 institutions were administered the TPB, HEXACO and a self-reported fruit and vegetable consumption m...

Breakfast consumption is important to health; however, adolescents often skip breakfast, and an increased understanding of the breakfast consumption patterns of adolescents is needed. The purpose of this study was to identify the predictors of breakfast eating, including the content and context, in an adolescent sample from Australia and England. F...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to utilise the comprehensive Food Safety Knowledge Instrument to compare food hygiene knowledge across a population of high school and university students in Australia and the UK. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 475 students from secondary schools and universities in Australia and the UK took part in...

Aim: To determine whether epilepsy treatments (number of antiepileptic drugs and surgical history) and/or depressed mood would influence the ability to benefit from memory training of outpatients with epilepsy who participated in a group-based, six-week, Memory Training Program. We also investigated the relationships between symptoms of depression,...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) with the addition of risk perception could predict safe food handling in a sample of adolescents from the UK and Australia over and above the explanatory power of knowledge. It was hypothesized that knowledge would predict both intention to prepare food safely and...

Purpose – Breakfast consumption is associated with a range of beneficial health outcomes including improved overall diet quality, lower BMI, decreased risk of chronic disease, and improved cognitive function. Although there are many models of health and social behaviour, there is a paucity of research utilising these in breakfast consumption and ve...

The aim of this study was to investigate whether the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) with the addition of risk awareness could predict breakfast consumption in a sample of adolescents from the UK and Australia. It was hypothesised that the TPB variables of attitudes, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control (PBC) would significantly pred...

Although contentious, there is evidence to suggest that nonconscious processes contribute to creative output, particularly during refractory periods. However, no one has examined whether this break benefit differs as a function of creative ability. To address these issues, this investigation examined Wallas's (1926) seminal theoretical framework of...

Recent work on the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) has lead to substantively different theoretical branches, of its putative functions, that have in some part developed independently of one another. The ATL has dense connectivity with a number of sensory modalities. This has resulted in empirical evidence that supports different functionality dependen...

Prejudice research in social neuroscience has largely relied upon imaging technologies which show that particular 'target' brain areas are activated after presenting prejudice-provoking stimuli. The social neuroscience approach to stereotype formation and prejudice has typically focused on the amygdala and frontal lobe as key areas. fMRI studies ha...

By nature, stereotypes require processes of categorization or semantic association, including social information about groups of people. There is empirical evidence that the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) processes domain-general semantic information, and supports social knowledge. A recent study showed that inhibitory repetitive transcranial magneti...

Alcohol consumption contributes to a significant proportion of disease and the high prevalence amongst young adults is a worldwide health concern. To determine which aspects of executive function (EF) distinguish binge-drinkers from non binge-drinkers and to establish the role of EF in predicting behaviour. Self-report questionnaires, four tests of...

Inhibiting the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) via repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) appears to have deleterious effects on people's semantic conceptualization, and left ATL damage is associated with semantic dementia. However, little research has investigated whether rTMS can inhibit conceptual schemata that have potentially negativ...

Social conceptual knowledge is imperative to communicate with, interact with, and interpret human society; however, little is known about the neural basis of social concepts. Previous research has predominantly suggested that the right anterior temporal lobe (ATL) may specifically represent social conceptual knowledge, whereas the left ATL is neces...

Twenty percent of food poisoning annually in Australia is believed to result from consumer food handling behaviour. Research advocates the use of social cognition theories in designing food hygiene interventions, however very few studies have actually done so. Thus, this study investigated the efficacy of a food hygiene intervention based on the Th...

Purpose The purpose of the current paper is to investigate the determinants of hygienic food handling behaviour using the health action process approach (HAPA) and to examine if the volitional components of the model or the addition of past behaviour could explain additional variance in behaviour. Design/methodology/approach A prospective four‐wee...

It is estimated that 5.4 million Australians get sick annually from eating contaminated food and that up to 20% of this illness results from food handling behaviour. A study was undertaken to investigate the efficacy of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) including past behaviour in predicting safe food handling intention and behaviour. One hundr...

The objective of the current study is to examine the determinants of breakfast consumption with the application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB; 1991) and investigate the additional variables of past behaviour and executive function. A prospective 1-week study investigating the predictive ability of TPB variables, past behaviour and executi...