Research on auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) indicates that AVH schizophrenia patients show greater abnormalities on tasks requiring recognition of affective prosody (AP) than non-AVH patients. Detecting AP requires accurate perception of manipulations in pitch, amplitude and duration. Schizophrenia patients with AVHs also experience difficulty detecting these acoustic manipulations; with a number of theorists speculating that difficulties in pitch, amplitude and duration discrimination underlie AP abnormalities. This study examined whether both AP and these aspects of auditory processing are also impaired in first degree relatives of persons with AVHs. It also examined whether pitch, amplitude and duration discrimination were related to AP, and to hallucination proneness. Unaffected relatives of AVH schizophrenia patients (N = 19) and matched healthy controls (N = 33) were compared using tone discrimination tasks, an AP task, and clinical measures. Relatives were slower at identifying emotions on the AP task (p = 0.002), with secondary analysis showing this was especially so for happy (p = 0.014) and neutral (p = 0.001) sentences. There was a significant interaction effect for pitch between tone deviation level and group (p = 0.019), and relatives performed worse than controls on amplitude discrimination and duration discrimination. AP performance for happy and neutral sentences was significantly correlated with amplitude perception. Lastly, AVH proneness in the entire sample was significantly correlated with pitch discrimination (r = 0.44) and pitch perception was shown to predict AVH proneness in the sample (p = 0.005). These results suggest basic impairments in auditory processing are present in relatives of AVH patients; they potentially underlie processing speed in AP tasks, and predict AVH proneness. This indicates auditory processing deficits may be a core feature of AVHs in schizophrenia, and are worthy of further study as a potential endophenotype for AVHs.

Assistive technologies promise improved functionality for people with disabilities, but their use and adoption are complicated. Previous research has identified several reasons why people with disabilities choose to abandon their assistive technologies. However, less is known about the adoption of assistive technologies that are permanent and user perceptions of these technologies. This study builds upon existing assistive technology, disability, identity, and stigma literature by examining the role of perceptions of cochlear implants, an assistive technology that permanently renders an invisible disability visible, among the single-sided deaf community. Analysis of survey data from 332 single-sided deaf individuals with cochlear implants all over the world revealed that the perceived visibility of assistive technology is positively associated with self-stigma and social interaction anxiety. Results from this study highlight the centrality of sociotechnical perceptions of assistive technologies to the experience of stigma, rather than the objective characteristics and features of technology, and problematize the existing dichotomous approach (visible v. invisible) to understanding assistive technologies. This study also illuminates the importance of studying assistive technologies on an intragroup level as well as focusing on how specific stigmatized niche communities may perceive and use their assistive technologies.

There is currently no robust method to evaluate how building design affects our emotion. Understanding emotion is significant, as it influences cognitive processes, behaviour and wellbeing, and is linked to the functioning of physiological systems. As mental health problems are more prevalent, and exposure to indoor environments is increasing, it is important we develop rigorous methods to understand whether design elements in our environment affect emotion. Using virtual reality and controlling for indoor environmental quality, 66 participants were exposed to different enclosed in¬door room scenes, to understand if scale affected self-report, autonomic nervous system and central nervous system correlates of emotion. Scale did not modulate neurophysiological measures or self-reported emotion, but there were differences between resting state and built environment conditions in autonomic measures, power spectral density and frontal power lateralisation. This study provides a rigorous empirical framework for assessing the environmental impact of a design characteristic on human emotion.

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Guided by the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement (TCD), this study analyzes 738 narratives describing negative (n = 381) and positive (n = 357) patient–provider interactions recounted by 399 female-identifying patients residing in 22 countries who are living with poorly understood chronic overlapping pain conditions (COPCs) such as fibromyalgia, vulvodynia, and endometriosis. Using thematic co-occurrence analysis (TCA), a novel method that builds on the identification of themes to map and visualize conceptual interrelationships, we identify nine enactments of (dis)enfranchising talk (DT) across three functions (discrediting, silencing, and stereotyping), four domains of consequences of DT (perceptual, emotional, physical, and material), and two patterns of co-occurrence between functions and consequences of DT (discrediting and physical, silencing and emotional). We illustrate how three MAXQDA software features can facilitate multi-coder TCA in large qualitative datasets. We offer theoretical implications and practical implications for communication researchers, patients, and medical providers toward improving difficult conversations concerning chronic pain.