Emotional prosody modulates attention in schizophrenia patients with hallucinations

ALBA FERRARA, L.; HIRNSTEIN, M.; WEIS, S.; DE ERAUSQUIN, G.; HAUSMANN, M.

Florencia

Conferencia; 3rd Biennial Schizophrenia International Research Conference; 2012

Schizophrenia International Research Society

Recent findings demonstrate that emotional prosody attracts attention involuntarily. Healthy participants overcome irrelevant salient stimuli by using attentional control. Attentional control is impaired in schizophrenia and there is evidence suggesting that such impairment may be a mechanism contributing to the formation of hallucinations. The present study aims to investigate the effects that implicit emotional prosody exerts on involuntary attention in schizophrenia. Fifteen schizophrenia patients with hallucinations, 12 schizophrenia patients without hallucinations and 16 healthy controls completed a dichotic listening paradigm, in which an emotional vocal outburst was paired with a neutral vocalization spoken in male and female voices. Participants were asked to attend to either the left or right ear and report only the sex of the speaker. Schizophrenia patients without hallucination and healthy controls revealed longer response times when emotional prosody was presented in the attended right ear than in the attended left ear. Responses were faster when the attended ear and the ear which received the emotional prosody differed. Schizophrenia patients with hallucinations, however, did not benefit from attending to one ear when the emotion was presented to the other ear. The findings suggest that in healthy controls and schizophrenia patients without hallucinations emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere as the right ear/left hemisphere has difficulty handling both, sex discrimination and emotional prosody processing. Schizophrenia patients with hallucinations on the other hand seem to have difficulties in top-down control. That is, when selective attention is interfered by automatic emotional processing (bottom-up input). Such anomalies may result from aberrant lateralization in emotional prosody.