Background:
Deficits in affective prosodic processing have been well established in patients with schizophrenia. Yet, no study has examined this skill in a bipolar sample, this was the aim of the current study.
Methods:
Three matched groups (patients with bipolar disorder, patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls) completed four affective prosody tasks from the Comprehensive Affective Testing System (CATS); emotional prosody discrimination (EPD), name emotional prosody (NEP), attend to prosody during conflicting prosody (CPP) and attend to meaning during conflicting prosody (CPM).
Results:
No significant group effects were found for any of the four tasks on either correct reaction time (RT) or accuracy measures. A task effect, however, was found across all four tasks showing a similar pattern for the RT (correct) and accuracy data; superior performance on EPD, then CPP, followed by NEP then CPM.
Conclusions:
The lack of group differences for each of the four tasks may be a reflection of the CATS paradigms lacking the capacity to effectively discriminate subtle differences in performance. An extensive literature indicates that individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do tend to perform worse on a range of affect tasks that use fearful and sad stimuli. Therefore, the lack of significant group effects in the current tasks may be because of an insufficient number of stimuli per affective category used in each task, thus poor power; alternatively, incongruent accent must be considered, that is, CATS uses American not Australian actors. Further study is recommended using experimental measures of affective prosody.
