Auditory Processes and Emotional Perception in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental illness with a variety of clinical symptoms that can be regrouped into 2 categories: positive and negative symptoms. This mental illness is also characterised by cognitive alterations in various fields, including social cognition difficulties and self / non-self-discrimination difficulties. Self and non-self-discrimination abilities have been regrouped under a function called source memory. This source memory enables a person to identify the source of an information previously encoded. In our everyday life, these processes are necessary to distinguish events generated by an external source from imagined events. It is called reality monitoring. A number of studies have evidenced reality-monitoring alterations in patients suffering from schizophrenia. More specifically, patients would present with an externalisation bias, they would assign more imagined events to an external source. The knowledge of these deficits encourages the study of the processes involved in order to better understand the alterations, particularly including auditory processes. A recent study has shown that discrimination errors concerning certain sound characteristics (e.g. frequency) were associated to reality monitoring errors. However, the links between reality-monitoring and basic auditory processes have rarely been explored. The dysfunction of the auditory "where" path, especially the possibility to discriminate between the intra and extra cephalic localisation of sounds, could lead to difficulties to discern between what is produced by one self and what is produced by another or the local environment.