Prosody abilities in a large sample of affective and non-affective first episode psychosis patients

Objective: Prosody comprehension deficits have been reported in major psychoses. It is still not clear whether these deficits occur at early psychosis stages. The aims of our study were to investigate a) linguistic and emotional prosody comprehension abilities in First Episode Psychosis (FEP) patients compared to healthy controls (HC); b) performance differences between non-affective (FEP-NA) and affective (FEP-A) patients, and c) association between symptoms severity and prosodic features. Methods: A total of 208 FEP (156 FEP-NA and 52 FEP-A) patients and 77 HC were enrolled and assessed with the Italian version of the “Protocole Montréal d'Evaluation de la Communication” to evaluate linguistic and emotional prosody comprehension. Clinical variables were assessed with a comprehensive set of standardized measures. Results: FEP patients displayed significant linguistic and emotional prosody deficits compared to HC, with FEP-NA showing greater impairment than FEP-A. Also, significant correlations between symptom severity and prosodic features in FEP patients were found. Conclusions: Our results suggest that prosodic impairments occur at the onset of psychosis being more prominent in FEP-NA and in those with severe psychopathology. These findings further support the hypothesis that aprosodia is a core feature of psychosis.