Affective Prosody in Psychosis: Recent evidence and future directions

Background: Affective prosody (AP) is substantially impaired in schizophrenia, (1) yet little is known about AP in bipolar disorder. (2) Further, as there are no standardised measures of AP, examination of this ability is difficult. (3) It has also been proposed that AP deficits are the result of problems in basic auditory processing skills. The aims of this presentation are, in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, to (1 & 2) examine AP performance on a newly released standardised assessment, and (3) highlight deficits in auditory processing that may contribute to AP performance. Methods: Fifty-four patients with schizophrenia and 43 bipolar disorder patients were compared with 112 healthy controls on four AP subtests of the Comprehensive Affective Testing System (CATS). Results: Schizophrenia patients showed a 10% reduction in accuracy on two subtests (name emotional prosody and attend to prosody when meaning and tone were conflicting) compared to healthy controls. Bipolar patients showed a trend for performance intermediary to schizophrenia and healthy controls. Severity of current auditory hallucination, across all patients, was related to task performance on three of the subtests. Conclusions: This data confirms that difficulties ascertaining the correct emotional tone of a spoken sentence contribute to the presentation of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We have further confirmed some previous work that suggested a relationship between AP and hearing voices. These data suggest the importance of using standardised measures in the assessment of AP. Last, we will illustrate the importance of pitch, amplitude and duration perception to the understanding of AP