title: Atypical mismatch negativity in response to emotional voices in people with autism spectrum conditions.
abstract: Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are characterized by heterogeneous impairments of social reciprocity and sensory processing. Voices, similar to faces, convey socially relevant information. Whether voice processing is selectively impaired remains undetermined. This study involved recording mismatch negativity (MMN) while presenting emotionally spoken syllables dada and acoustically matched nonvocal sounds to 20 subjects with ASC and 20 healthy matched controls. The people with ASC exhibited no MMN response to emotional syllables and reduced MMN to nonvocal sounds, indicating general impairments of affective voice and acoustic discrimination. Weaker angry MMN amplitudes were associated with more autistic traits. Receiver operator characteristic analysis revealed that angry MMN amplitudes yielded a value of 0.88 (p<.001). The results suggest that people with ASC may process emotional voices in an atypical fashion already at the automatic stage. This processing abnormality can facilitate diagnosing ASC and enable social deficits in people with ASC to be predicted.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience and Brain Research Center, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yang-Teng
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Fan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience and Brain Research Center, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan; Department of Rehabilitation, National Yang-Ming University Hospital, Yilan, Taiwan; Department of Research and Education, Taipei City Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yawei
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cheng
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000786:Anger; D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012372:ROC Curve; D011930:Reaction Time; D012938:Social Perception; D066107:Social Skills; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult