Study on Communication Comprehension in the Schizophrenic Spectrum (SKYPROVERB)

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.

Emotional judgment task, post-experimental questionnaire, recognition task, detection task, questionnaire CAPE-42, trait emotional intelligence questionnaire and positive and negative syndrome scale.

Healthy participants with few psychotic experience. Participants with the lowest score to the CAPE-42 test. Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview

Healthy participants with several psychotic experiences. Participants with the highest score to the CAPE-42 test. Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview

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.

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.

Neuropsychological tests will allow evaluating the cognitive profile of the participants that can impact their behaviour during the experiment.

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.

Brazo P, Beaucousin V, Lecardeur L, Razafimandimby A, Dollfus S. Social cognition in schizophrenic patients: the effect of semantic content and emotional prosody in the comprehension of emotional discourse. Front Psychiatry. 2014 Sep 10;5:120. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2014.00120. eCollection 2014.

Edwards J, Jackson HJ, Pattison PE. Emotion recognition via facial expression and affective prosody in schizophrenia: a methodological review. Clin Psychol Rev. 2002 Jul;22(6):789-832. doi: 10.1016/s0272-7358(02)00130-7. Erratum In: Clin Psychol Rev. 2002 Nov;22(8):1267-85.

Beaucousin V, Lacheret A, Turbelin MR, Morel M, Mazoyer B, Tzourio-Mazoyer N. FMRI study of emotional speech comprehension. Cereb Cortex. 2007 Feb;17(2):339-52. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhj151. Epub 2006 Mar 8.