Basic auditory processing and emotion recognition in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis

Abstract

The ability to understand others' emotions from subtle cues is a critical skill for navigating the complex social world, with increasing demands placed on this capability as children enter adolescence. Individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR) of developing psychosis exhibit social isolation with specific impairments in social cognition (Thompson et al., 2011) and emotion recognition (Addington et al., 2008; Amminger et al., 2011; Corcoran et al., 2015). The degree of social impairment and the severity of emotion recognition deficits are greater in individuals who later convert to psychosis than in those who do not (Cornblatt et al., 2011). Emotion recognition deficits thus represent promising targets for improving early identification and intervention strategies (Addington et al., 2008; Amminger et al., 2011; Cornblatt et al., 2011; Kee et al., 2003; Niemi et al., 2005). A significant challenge remains however, to identify a precursor of emotional recognition deficits for use as a salient diagnostic tool and therapeutic target. Impairments in basic auditory processes may underlie the auditory emotion identification deficits and social functioning deficits associated with psychotic disorders and at-risk states. The auditory properties of speech convey emotional content (Banse and Scherer, 1996; Hammerschmidt and Jurgens, 2007), and the ability to identify emotion from these vocal cues is impaired in schizophrenia (Addington et al., 2008; Amminger et al., 2011; Bach et al., 2009; Corcoran et al., 2015; Cornblatt et al., 2011; Dickey et al., 2010; Dickey et al., 2008; Kee et al., 2003; Leitman et al., 2007; Leitman et al., 2010; Niemi et al., 2005; Thompson et al., 2011), schizotypal personality disorder (Dickey et al., 2010; Dickey et al., 2008), and CHR subjects (Corcoran et al., 2015; Thompson et al., 2011). We recently reported that individuals with schizophrenia exhibit wide ranging basic auditory processing deficits, and that additional basic auditory processing abilities, including formant discrimination, sinusoidal amplitude modulation detection, and duration discrimination are associated with the ability to recognize emotion in voice (Kraus et al., 2019). In this study, we have aimed to determine whether CHR individuals exhibit similar widespread auditory processing deficits associated with impaired emotion recognition.