Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 58, Issue 1, 1 July 2005, Pages 56-61
Biological Psychiatry

Original article
Sensory Contributions to Impaired Prosodic Processing in Schizophrenia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.02.034Get rights and content

Background

Deficits in affect recognition are prominent features of schizophrenia. Within the auditory domain, patients show difficulty in interpreting vocal emotional cues based on intonation (prosody). The relationship of these symptoms to deficits in basic sensory processing has not been previously evaluated.

Methods

Forty-three patients and 34 healthy comparison subjects were tested on two affective prosody measures: voice emotion identification and voice emotion discrimination. Basic auditory sensory processing was measured using a tone-matching paradigm and the Distorted Tunes Test (DTT). A subset of subjects was also tested on facial affect identification and discrimination tasks.

Results

Patients showed significantly impaired performance on all emotion processing tasks. Within the patient group, a principal components analysis demonstrated significant intercorrelations between basic pitch perception and affective prosodic performance. In contrast, facial affect recognition deficits represented a distinct second component. Prosodic affect measures correlated significantly with severity of negative symptoms and impaired global outcome.

Conclusions

These results demonstrate significant relationships between basic auditory processing deficits and impaired receptive prosody in schizophrenia. The separate loading of auditory and visual affective recognition measures suggests that within-modality factors may be more significant than cross-modality factors in the etiology of affect recognition deficits in schizophrenia.

Section snippets

Participants

Forty-three stable patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for either schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 34 healthy control subjects volunteered to serve in this experiment. The Institutional Review Board of the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research approved all experimental procedures, and all patients were recruited from facilities associated with the Institute. Written, informed consent was provided by all subjects after the procedures of the experiment were fully explained.

Between-Group Analyses

Tone Matching Task and DTT performance were obtained for patients only. Tone Matching Task performance is shown in Table 2 and is similar to that obtained in previous studies with similar patients (Javitt et al 1999, Rabinowicz et al 2000, Strous et al 1995). Mean performance across all five levels was 77 ± 14%. In a prior study in which we tested performance on the three middle levels of the five used in the present study (5%, 10%, and 20%) (Strous et al 1995), patients scored a mean of 72%

Discussion

The ability to decode other people’s emotional states by analyzing either their vocal intonations or facial expression is an integral part of human existence, leading to significant recent interest in this process in schizophrenia (e.g., Edwards et al 2002, Gur et al 2002, Suslow et al 2003). The present study demonstrates that patients with schizophrenia show significant impairments in the ability to decode affect based on either auditory vocal or visual facial cues, replicating previous work

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