Auditory tasks for assessment of sensory function and affective prosody in schizophrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairments in auditory-based social cognition, indicated by deficits in detection of prosody, such as affective prosody and basic pitch perception. However, little is known about the psychometric properties of behavioral tests used to assess these functions. The goal of this paper is to characterize the properties of prosody and pitch perception tasks and to investigate whether they can be shortened. The pitch perception test evaluated is a tone-matching task developed by Javitt and colleagues (J-TMT). The prosody test evaluated is the auditory emotion recognition task developed by Juslin and Laukka (JL-AER). The sample includes 124 schizophrenia patients (SZ) and 131 healthy controls (HC). Properties, including facility and discrimination, of each item were assessed. Effects of item characteristics (e.g., emotion) were also evaluated. Shortened versions of the tests are proposed based on facility, discrimination, and/or ability of item characteristics to discriminate between patients and controls. Test-retest reliability is high for patients and controls for both the original and short forms of the J-TMT and JL-AER. Thus, the original as well as short forms of the J-TMT and JL-AER are suggested for inclusion in clinical trials of social cognitive and perceptual treatments. The development of short forms further increases the utility of these auditory tasks in clinical trials and clinical practice. The large SZ vs. HC differences reported here also highlight the profound nature of auditory deficits and a need for remediation.

Deficient Emotional Intelligence and Dysfunctional Early Emotional Prosody Processing Varying with the Severity of Auditory Hallucinations in Schizophrenics

“…It should be mentioned that all of the SPs in the present study demonstrated deficits in perceptual Dysfunctional Early Emotional Prosody Processing in Schizophrenics brain responses to sadness (vs. controls), which is consistent with other studies [18,59]. The sad sound features low pitch variability, a relatively low base frequency, low mean voice intensity, and slow speech rate [60,61]. These attributes should render sad sounds as signals of reduced salience.…”

Stereological Assessments of Neuronal Pathology in Auditory Cortex in Schizophrenia

“…Auditory sensory processing deficits correlate with gray matter loss in Heschl’s gyrus in schizophrenia (Salisbury et al, 2007 ) and are now understood to reflect structural alterations, in particular, altered neuron morphology in A1 in schizophrenia (Leitman et al, 2007 , 2010 ; Petkova et al, 2014 ; Javitt and Sweet, 2015 ). To date, human postmortem studies have revealed several important neuronal morphological aberrations in auditory cortex in schizophrenia (Figure 6A ).…”

Behavioral assessment of auditory processing deficits in schizophrenia: Literature review and suggestions for future research

“…In order to investigate the properties of a pitch perception task and an auditory emotion recognition (AER) task, Petkova, Lu, Kantrowitz et al . () examined a large group of schizophrenia patients and another one of healthy controls. Apart from suggesting shorter forms of these tests, the researchers highlighted the patients' impairments in both pitch perception and emotion recognition, compared with the healthy control group.…”