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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on September 3, 2009
Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp092
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Evidence for Impaired Sound Intensity Processing in Schizophrenia

Dominik R. Bach1,2,4, Karin Buxtorf2, Werner K. Strik2, John G. Neuhoff3 and Erich Seifritz2,5
2 University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
3 Department of Psychology, College of Wooster, Wooster, OH
4 Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, UK
5 Clinic for Affective Disorders and General Psychiatry, Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK; tel: +44-20-7833-7472; fax: +44-20-7813-1420; e-mail: d.bach{at}fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk

Patients with schizophrenia are impaired in many aspects of auditory processing, but indirect evidence suggests that intensity perception is intact. However, because the extraction of meaning from dynamic intensity relies on structures that appear to be altered in schizophrenia, we hypothesized that the perception of auditory looming is impaired as well. Twenty inpatients with schizophrenia and 20 control participants, matched for age, gender, and education, gave intensity ratings of rising (looming) and falling intensity sounds with different mean intensities. Intensity change was overestimated in looming as compared with receding sounds in both groups. However, healthy individuals showed a stronger effect at higher mean intensity, in keeping with previous findings, while patients with schizophrenia lacked this modulation. We discuss how this might support the notion of a more general deficit in extracting emotional meaning from different sensory cues, including intensity and pitch.

Keywords: looming / perceptual bias / auditory / pitch perception / prosody / dynamic intensity / paranoid schizophrenia


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