1. Vocal Expression in Schizophrenia: Less Than Meets the Ear
- Author
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Cohen, Alex S, Mitchell, Kyle R, Docherty, Nancy M, and Horan, William P
- Subjects
Biological Psychology ,Psychology ,Schizophrenia ,Mental Health ,Clinical Research ,Brain Disorders ,Mental health ,Adult ,Female ,Humans ,Male ,Mental Status Schedule ,Middle Aged ,Principal Component Analysis ,Schizophrenic Psychology ,Signal Processing ,Computer-Assisted ,Speech ,Speech Acoustics ,schizophrenia ,negative ,alogia ,blunted affect ,computer ,Cognitive Sciences ,Clinical Psychology ,Applied and developmental psychology ,Clinical and health psychology ,Cognitive and computational psychology - Abstract
Abnormalities in nonverbal communication are a hallmark of schizophrenia. Results from studies using symptom rating scales suggest that these abnormalities are profound (i.e., 3-5 SDs) and occur across virtually every channel of vocal expression. Computerized acoustic analytic technologies, used to overcome practical and psychometric limitations with symptom rating scales, have found much more benign and isolated abnormalities. To better understand vocal deficits in schizophrenia and to advance acoustic analytic technologies for clinical and research applications, we examined archived speech samples from 5 separate studies, each using different speaking tasks (patient N = 309; control N = 117). We sought to: (a) use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify independent vocal expression measures from a large set of variables, (b) quantify how patients with schizophrenia are abnormal with respect to these variables, (c) evaluate the impact of demographic and contextual factors (e.g., study site, speaking task), and (d) examine the relationship between clinically-rated psychiatric symptoms and vocal variables. PCA identified 7 independent markers of vocal expression. Most of these vocal variables varied considerably as a function of context and many were associated with demographic factors. After controlling for context and demographics, there were no meaningful differences in vocal expression between patients and controls. Within patients, vocal variables were associated with a range of psychiatric symptoms-though only pause length was significantly associated with clinically rated negative symptoms. The discussion centers on explaining the apparent discordance between clinical and computerized speech measures.
- Published
- 2016