Scientific article
French

Altered lateralisation of emotional prosody processing in schizophrenia

Published inSchizophrenia research, vol. 110, p. 180-187
Publication date2009
Abstract

Alterations of cerebral lateralisation in schizophrenia have been reported consistently, and a reduced left-lateralisation has been suggested for language functions. Speech contains nonverbal information, e.g. prosody, and on a behavioural level, the extraction of emotional information from prosody is often impaired in schizophrenia. A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study suggests increased left-lateralisation in schizophrenia during prosody processing, but did not disentangle effects of speech processing as such and emotional prosody processing. Here, we used meaningless syllables spoken with neutral, angry or fearful speech melody and measured blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses in 15 in-patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy control participants matched for age and gender. Lateralisation indices were calculated for responses to emotional versus neutral prosody, and for all types of prosody versus baseline. Compared to control participants, patients with schizophrenia showed an increased right-lateralisation of emotional and non-emotional prosody processing in the temporal and parietal cortex. This right-lateralisation was increased in patients with reduced right-handedness and decreased in patients with stronger negative symptoms, particularly affective blunting, and with longer hospitalisation. Although patients with schizophrenia performed worse in emotion identification, this deficit was not related to lateralisation indices. Enhanced right-lateralisation to prosody resembles previous findings on laterality changes in speech processing and might suggest a common underlying cause in the organization of language functions.

Keywords
  • Lateralization index
  • L1
  • Emotional
  • Affective
  • Prosody
  • Language
  • Paranoid schizophrenia
Citation (ISO format)
BACH, Dominik R. et al. Altered lateralisation of emotional prosody processing in schizophrenia. In: Schizophrenia research, 2009, vol. 110, p. 180–187. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2009.02.011
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
accessLevelRestricted
Identifiers
Journal ISSN0920-9964
635views
2downloads

Technical informations

Creation16/08/2010 11:30:00
First validation16/08/2010 11:30:00
Update14/03/2023 16:01:13
Status update14/03/2023 16:01:13
Last indexation29/10/2024 16:43:07
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of GenevaunigeBlack