Clinical trial NCT03225027: Study on Communication Comprehension in the Schizophrenic Spectrum
Official title: Study on Communication Comprehension in the Schizophrenic Spectrum
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Schizophrenia Simple
Keywords: Emotional prosody, schizophrenia
Lead sponsor: Hôpital NOVO
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2017-07-21
Enrollment: 59
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 60
Standard ages: ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: NON_RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Intervention model description: One experimental procedure proposed to three groups of participants
Primary purpose: PREVENTION

Brief summary: 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.

Detailed description: 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.

Eligibility criteria: 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.

Primary outcomes:
measure: Behavioural measures (response rate and time)
timeFrame: During the experiment
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Symptomatic impact
timeFrame: During the experiment
measure: Evaluate the cognitive functioning
timeFrame: During the experiment
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Cergy-Pontoise
country: France
facility: HDJ François Villon
Study officials:
affiliation: HDJ François Villon (Centre Hospitaliser René-Dubos)
name: Mouna TRABELSI, MD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: CRFDP (University of Rouen)
name: Virginie BEAUCOUSIN, PhD
role: STUDY_CHAIR
References:
citation: 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.
citation: 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.
citation: 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.