Study on Communication Comprehension in the Schizophrenic Spectrum

The integration of ortholinguistic and paralinguistic functions in language, particularly of the emotional prosody, is necessary to interact adaptively with others. People in the schizophrenic spectrum have social difficulties. Is emotional prosody comprehension altered in these people? According to Edwards et al. (2002), there is methodological issues concerning the tasks used to answer this question. Investigators built an emotional judgment task more adapted to study the perception of emotional prosody in the schizophrenic spectrum than the classical paradigm designed to evaluate participants with cerebral injury. The investigators have elaborated a material that consists of 140 short sentences (7±2 words) with a simple syntactic structure. The verbal content expressed positive, neutral or negative emotions. These sentences were announced by four professional actors (two female) with an emotional prosody content congruent or inconsistent with the verbal content. Participants will have to evaluate the emotional intensity of the recordings on a five points Likert scale, from strongly negative to strongly positive. Psychotic experiences of all participants will be evaluated too.

Inclusion criteria

• Having a diagnosis of schizophrenia and being in a stable phase of the disease
• Having between 18 to 60 years old
• Speak french or using french at school
• Accepting not to use psychoactive substances during the preceding 48h
• Being affiliated to the French social security
• Providing their written informed consent

Non-inclusion Criteria:

• Having not audio deficits, nor visual uncorrected deficits
• Having not suffering from depressive symptoms during the last 6 months

Exclusion criteria

• Having no neurological, nor psychiatric disease except schizophrenia for the patients groups.