Are auditory–verbal hallucinations associated with auditory affective processing deficits? Susan L. Rossell * , Catherine L. Boundy Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia Received 23 March 2005; received in revised form 30 May 2005; accepted 1 June 2005 Available online 7 July 2005 Abstract We investigated whether the presence of auditory–verbal hallucinations (AVH) was associated with impaired auditory affect perception. Controls, schizophrenia patients with a history of AVH (AVH) or with no history of AVH (NAVH) completed four perceptual auditory affect tasks. The tasks used either non-verbal/non-semantic or verbal/semantic stimuli. AVH patients showed significant impairments on a non-verbal task requiring the recognition of environmental sounds, this was particularly so for the affective stimuli and not the neutral valance stimuli. Thus, confirming auditory affect deficits in AVH patients. AVH patients also showed reduced right ear performance on a dichotic listening task. Conversely, both patient groups showed impairments on auditory affect tasks that used verbal/semantic stimuli; as these tasks require proficient semantic processing we speculated that significant semantic impairments in schizophrenia masked the additional auditory affect deficits present in the AVH group. The overall results support the notion that patients with AVH have increased liability for auditory affect perception deficits. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Schizophrenia; Emotion/affect; Auditory processing; Auditory–verbal hallucinations 1. Introduction A symptom experienced by many people with schizophrenia is the auditory–verbal hallucination (AVH); the experience is of some unknown person speaking to the patient, often critically or command- ingly (i.e. charged with emotion). Phenomenological surveys have confirmed the importance of the content of hallucinations and their meaning to the voice-hearer. The AVHs are characterised as voice/s addressing the hearer in the third or second person in variable emotive tones, i.e. angry, frightening or pleasant etc (Nayani and David, 1996). Furthermore, it has long been recognised that disturbances of affect are one of the most pervasive and cardinal features of schizo- phrenia; however, the specificity, extent, and nature of these affective deficits are unclear, especially their relationship with AVH. 0920-9964/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2005.06.002 * Corresponding author. Current address: Mental Health Research Institute, 155 Oak St, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia. Tel.: +61 3 93892602; fax: +61 3 93875061. E-mail address: srossell@mhri.edu.au (S.L. Rossell). Schizophrenia Research 78 (2005) 95 – 106 www.elsevier.com/locate/schres