Atypical mismatch negativity to distressful voices associated with conduct disorder symptoms

Abstract

Background Although a general consensus holds that emotional reactivity in youth with conduct disorder (CD) symptoms arises as one of the main causes of successive aggression, it remains to be determined whether automatic emotion processing is altered in this population. Methods We measured auditory event-related potentials (ERP) in twenty young offenders and twenty controls, screened for DSM-IV criteria of CD and evaluated using the youth version of Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL:YV), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and Barrett Impulsive Scale (BIS-11). In an oddball design, sadly or fearfully spoken “deviant” syllables were randomly presented within a train of emotionally neutral “standard” syllables. Results In young offenders meeting with CD criteria, the ERP component mismatch negativity (MMN), presumed to reflect pre-attentive auditory change detection, was significantly stronger for fearful than sad syllables. No MMN differences for fearful vs. sad syllables were observed in controls. Analyses of non-vocal deviants, matched spectrally with the fearful and sad sounds, supported our interpretation that the MMN abnormalities in juvenile offenders were related to the emotional content of sounds, instead of purely acoustic factors. Further, in the young offenders with CD symptoms, strong MMN amplitudes to fearful syllables were associated with high impulsive tendencies (PCL:YV, Factor 2). Higher trait and state anxiety, assessed by STAI, were positively correlated with P3a amplitudes to fearful and sad syllables, respectively. The differences in group-interaction MMN/P3a patterns to emotional syllables and non-vocal sounds could be speculated to suggest that there is a distinct processing route for pre-attentive processing of species-specific emotional information in human auditory cortices. Conclusions Our results suggest that youths with CD symptoms may process distressful voices in an atypical fashion already at the pre-attentive level. This auditory processing abnormality correlated with increased impulsivity and anxiety. Our results may help shed light on the neural mechanisms of aggression.

Atypical Mismatch Negativity in Response to Emotional Voices in People with Autism Spectrum Conditions

“…The CSD method, as a measure of the strength of extracellular current generators underlying the recorded EEG potentials [46], computes the surface Laplacian over the surface potentials implying the dipole sources oriented normal to local skull [31], [47].…”

Testosterone modulates preattentive sensory processing and involuntary attention switches to emotional voices

“…The stimulus materials consisted of two categories: emotional syllables and acoustically matched nonvocal sounds. Fearfully, happily, and neutrally spoken syllables dada were selected as the stimuli (please refer to Cheng et al 2012;Fan and Cheng 2014;Fan et al 2013;Hung et al 2013;Hung and Cheng 2014 for validation). To create a set of control stimuli that retain acoustical correspondence, i.e., the temporal and spectral features of emotional syllables, we synthesized nonvocal sounds with Praat (Boersma 2001) and MATLAB (MathWorks).…”

“…MMN and P3a in response to emotional syllables have recently indicated the emotional salience of voice perception at the preattentive level (Chen et al 2014;Cheng et al 2012;Fan et al 2013). Similarly, youths with autism spectrum conditions and conduct disorder symptoms exhibited altered MMN and P3a in response to emotional syllables (Fan and Cheng 2014;Hung et al 2013). In a previous study, female participants displayed stronger fearful MMN than males did (Hung and Cheng 2014), inferring the sex hormone-mediated processing of emotional voices.…”

Mismatch negativity (MMN) stands at the crossroads between explicit and implicit emotional processing

“…The ratings on the Likert-scale (mean 6 SD) of fearful, angry, and neutral syllables were 4.34 6 0.65, 4.26 6 0.85, and 2.47 6 0.87, respective [see Chen et al, 2015Chen et al, , 2014Chen et al, , 2016aChen et al, , 2016bCheng et al, 2012;Fan et al, 2013;Hung et al, 2013;Hung and Cheng, 2014 for validation]. A female speaker from a performing arts school produced the meaningless syllables dada with three sets of emotional (fearful, angry, neutral) prosodies.…”