The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the effect of emotional prosody on the perception of emotional discourse in the schizophrenic spectrum. The investigators hypothesize that participant may use emotional prosody as an emotional cue to understand the emotional content of discourse.
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.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
NON_RANDOMIZED
Purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
NONE
Enrollment
59
Participants had to indicate on a computer the emotional intensity of audio recordings.
Participants will be invited to give us the cognitive strategy used to resolve the emotional judgment task.
Participants will be invited to indicate which recordings they had heard during the emotional judgment task to verify that they have paid attention to the emotional task.
HDJ François Villon
Cergy-Pontoise, France
Behavioural measures (response rate and time)
Participants will have to judge the emotional intensity of audio recordings. In this task, the participant is asked to judge the emotional intensity of audio recordings of men and women (2 actors + 2 actresses): he / she must press a button as quickly as possible to indicate whether the Audio recordings presented via small speakers are very negative, negative, non-emotional, positive or very positive (5 possible choices). The response time variable may be added as a co-variable in order to avoid perceptive-motor disorders (medication-related and / or general motor slowdown) that may influence the results of time-of- answers.
Time frame: During the experiment
Symptomatic impact
Evaluate the nature of the psychotic experiments (CAPE-42 test).
Time frame: During the experiment
Evaluate the cognitive functioning
Neuropsychological tests will allow evaluating the cognitive profile of the participants that can impact their behaviour during the experiment.
Time frame: During the experiment
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Participants indicate every time they heard a given sound in order to verify their audition level.
This questionnaire allows evaluating the nature of psychotic experiences.
To evaluate their emotional intelligence.
Evaluating the clinical status of patients with schizophrenia.
Evaluating the exclusion criteria in healthy participants.