Abstract
Although the general consensus holds that emotional perception is impaired in patients with schizophrenia, the extent to which neural processing of emotional voices is altered in schizophrenia remains to be determined. This study enrolled 30 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 30 controls and measured their mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of auditory event-related potentials (ERP). In a passive oddball paradigm, happily or angrily spoken deviant syllables dada were randomly presented within a train of emotionally neutral standard syllables. Results showed that MMN in response to angry syllables and angry-derived non-vocal sounds was significantly decreased in individuals with schizophrenia. P3a to angry syllables showed stronger amplitudes but longer latencies. Weaker MMN amplitudes were associated with more positive symptoms of schizophrenia. Receiver operator characteristic analysis revealed that angry MMN, angry-derived MMN, and angry P3a could help predict whether someone had received a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia. The findings suggested general impairments of voice perception and acoustic discrimination in patients with chronic schizophrenia. The emotional salience processing of voices showed an atypical fashion at the preattentive level, being associated with positive symptoms in schizophrenia.
Highlights
Schizophrenia, a chronic and disabling brain disorder, has three categories of symptoms: positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms
The area under the ROC curve (AUC) values for angry-derived mismatch negativity (MMN) and angry P3a were 0.70 (p = 0.007) and 0.66 (p = 0.037). This indicated that angry and angry-derived MMN as well as angry P3a could help predict whether someone had received a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia or not
This study aims to clarify the extent to which basic auditory processing contributes to impaired emotional prosodic detection in schizophrenia
Summary
Schizophrenia, a chronic and disabling brain disorder, has three categories of symptoms: positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Some studies reported that deficits of emotional prosodic identification in individuals with schizophrenia reflect, at least in part, a relative inability to process the acoustic characteristics of prosodic stimuli (Leitman et al, 2005, 2010, 2011). They have argued that schizophrenia is associated with structural and functional disturbances at the primary auditory cortex (Leitman et al, 2007). Individuals with schizophrenia relative to healthy controls showed comparable performance for discriminating among terminal pitch changes, but more difficulties for internal pitch discrimination (Matsumoto et al, 2006)
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