Affect processing in chronically psychotic patients: development of a reliable assessment tool

We developed an economical clinical tool for assessing affect processing deficits in patients with chronic schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Using trained raters, we assessed spontaneous prosody, prosodic comprehension, prosodic repetition, and recognition of facial affect. High interrater reliability and good separation between subscales was demonstrated. Our tool discriminated between the performance of subjects versus controls on measures of spontaneous prosody and prosodic comprehension, suggesting the presence of prosodic deficits in psychiatric patients. These findings underscore the need for reliable and valid testing tools which will allow greater understanding of affective prosodic processing deficits in psychiatric populations.