Sensory contributions to impaired prosodic processing in schizophrenia.
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.
Leitman
David I
DI
Program in Cognitive Neuroscience and Schizophrenia, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY 10962, USA.
Foxe
John J
JJ
Butler
Pamela D
PD
Saperstein
Alice
A
Revheim
Nadine
N
Javitt
Daniel C
DC
D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology