Multisensory integration of affective faces and voices in psychosis proneness

Abstract

It has been proposed that dysfunctions in emotional multisensory integration (MSI) could contribute to the development of psychosis. To further substantiate this proposition, we investigated whether impaired MSI of emotional cues can be observed in people with high psychosis proneness without a diagnosis of psychosis and whether it is associated with aberrant perception and psychotic experiences. Adults scoring high vs. low on the positive subscale of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (score ≥9 or <9, respectively; n = 36 each) categorized the perceived emotion and rated the intensity of unimodal, bimodal emotionally congruent and bimodal emotionally incongruent dynamic face-voice stimuli. In different blocks, participants were asked to attend to one modality and to ignore the other modality input. Additionally, participants completed self-report questionnaires on anomalous perceptual experiences, hallucinations and paranoia. Participants with high and low psychosis proneness did not differ in emotion categorization performance as indicated by similar inverse efficiency (IE) scores (i.e., mean reaction time divided by accuracy) in all conditions, nor did they differ in intensity ratings in any condition. Correlation analyses did not reveal significant associations between crossmodal (in)congruency effects and self-reported anomalous perceptual experiences, hallucinations or paranoia. Our findings, thus, do not provide support for the assumption that MSI of emotional cues is linked to altered perception or subclinical psychotic symptoms, nor for the notion that MSI of emotional cues is already altered at a very early stage in the developmental trajectory of psychosis.

Fig. 1. Experimental design.

Capital letters represent buttons for emotion categorization: S sad, A angry, H Happy, N Neutral, D deviant recognition via space bar. Adopted from “Preattentive processing of audio-visual emotional signals” by J. Föcker, M. Gondan, & B. Röder, 2011, Acta Psychologica, 137(1), 36–47 (10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.02.004).

Fig. 2. Inverse efficiency scores and perceived emotional intensity per group and stimulus condition, separated by attention condition.

For both, the low and the high proneness groups (n = 36 each), the distributions of inverse efficiency scores and emotional intensity ratings are depicted per stimulus condition and attention condition. Congruent = bimodal emotionally congruent; incongruent = bimodal emotionally incongruent.