Elevated depressive symptoms associate with an emotion-general deficit in speech perception at a cocktail party

Abstract

Individuals with major depressive disorder demonstrate significant deficits in social communication. While the majority of work on individuals with elevated depressive symptoms focuses on speech production, much less is known about speech perception in individuals with elevated depressive symptoms. Here, we examine speech perception in the presence of different types of distractions. Two forms of distraction are hypothesized to interfere with speech perception in such listening conditions: energetic masking (EM) and information masking (IM). Relative to EM, IM places greater demands on executive function. A recent study showed that individuals with elevated depressive symptoms exhibit a selective deficit in perception of neutral speech during primarily IM conditions, likely due to their impairments in executive function. Here, we examined whether this selective deficit extends to emotional speech that portrays anger, fear, happiness, or sadness. Results showed that during IM conditions, individuals with elevated depressive symptoms exhibited poorer performance for neutral as well as for the four emotion categories, compared with those without elevated depression symptoms. However, both groups performed comparably during EM conditions. These findings suggest that elevated depressive symptoms are associated with an emotion-general deficit in speech perception in noise conditions that place demands on executive function.