How can emotion and familiarity improve own-name oddball paradigms?

The own-name paradigm is used to assess the depth of consciousness disorders in patients in intensive care units. This auditory oddball paradigm elicits a positive event-related potential at 300 ms (named P300) after the presentation of a deviant auditory stimulus, here the subject's own-name. This P300 likely reflects the neural processing of the novel stimulus, which can trigger a behavioral response. Presence of a P300 response is considered to be indicative of a good prognosis for recovering to wakefulness in post-anoxic coma patients. However, its prognostic performance is insufficient and some disorders of consciousness patients without a P300 response will nevertheless awake. The auditory P300 response is influenced by the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli. The use of stimuli with an emotional valence may recruit additional brain networks besides the auditory and attentional ones and potentially improve the prognostic value of the P300 response. Moreover, better characterization of the recruitment of different brain networks involved in these P300 responses in response to emotional stimuli would help in understanding the surface event-related potentials. Here, we present two kind of emotional acoustic features that can be used in these paradigms: "smiling" versus "rough" voice and the familiarity of the voice.