An examination of auditory processing and affective prosody in relatives of patients with auditory hallucinations

Abstract

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.

Emotion recognition in unaffected first-degree relatives of individuals with first-episode schizophrenia

“…Four previous studies examined recognition of specific emotions in faces only (Bediou et al, 2007;Leppanen et al, 2008;Eack et al, 2010;Fett et al, 2012) and one study in prosody only (Tucker et al, 2013). One further study examined face and prosody ER aggregately, but not for individual emotions (Kee et al, 2004).…”

“…Second, studies have used diverse ER measures, making direct comparisons problematic, and only two studies have examined prosody ER in FDR (Kee et al, 2004;Tucker et al, 2013). Perhaps more importantly, only some studies examined whether emotion-specific ER deficits were present in FDR (Bediou et al, 2007;Leppanen et al, 2008;Eack et al, 2010;Fett et al, 2012;Tucker et al, 2013). Compared to healthy controls, two studies have found that siblings had impaired recognition of disgust and fear (Bediou et al, 2007) and anger (Leppanen et al, 2008).…”

“…Apart from being clearly associated with the illness and present during remission, the criteria for an endophenotype include that it is heritable and more frequently present in unaffected relatives than in the general population, while still being more frequently present in the affected than unaffected family members (Gottesman and Gould, 2003). The evidence regarding the heritability of disturbed ER, investigated in studies of unaffected first-degree relatives (FDR) of people with schizophrenia is highly inconsistent, with some studies finding significant ER deficits in unaffected FDR compared to healthy controls (McCown et al, 1988;Kee et al, 2004;Bediou et al, 2007;Leppanen et al, 2008;de Achaval et al, 2010;Eack et al, 2010;Li et al, 2010), and others finding no ER impairment in FDR (Toomey et al, 1999;Bolte and Poustka, 2003;Goghari et al, 2011;Fett et al, 2012;Li et al, 2012;Tucker et al, 2013). Several reasons may account for these inconsistent findings.…”

“…Several reasons may account for these inconsistent findings. The first is the large variability in the FDR samples recruited to each study, including siblings (Kee et al, 2004;Bediou et al, 2007;Leppanen et al, 2008;Fett et al, 2012;Li et al, 2012), parents (McCown et al, 1988), or a mixture of FDR including offspring and second-degree relatives (Toomey et al, 1999;de Achaval et al, 2010;Eack et al, 2010;Tucker et al, 2013). Second, studies have used diverse ER measures, making direct comparisons problematic, and only two studies have examined prosody ER in FDR (Kee et al, 2004;Tucker et al, 2013).…”

Is Emotional Intelligence Impaired in Unaffected Siblings of Patients with Schizophrenia?

“…However, the scientific literature dealing with this topic is not consistent: some studies resulted in conflicting findings of intact social cognitive performance in first degree relatives (Fett & Maat, 2013; Goghari, Macdonald, & Sponheim, 2011; Tucker, Farhall, Thomas, Groot, & Rossell, 2013) and further research is needed to clarify the role of social cognitive impairments as potential endophenotypes for schizophrenia.…”