Functional abnormalities in the cortical processing of sound complexity and musical consonance in schizophrenia: evidence from an evoked potential study

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Yung-Ting Chen¹  Wei-Hong Chen¹  Sheng-Fu Liang¹  Ching-Wen Chao²  Kuan-Yi Wu³  Ching-I Hung³ 

[1] Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering & Institute of Medical Informatics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan;Department of Music, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan;Department of Psychiatry, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital at Linkou & College of Medicine, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan;

关键词: Music perception;    Auditory evoked potential;    Event-related potential;    Schizophrenia;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-13-158

 received in 2012-07-11, accepted in 2013-05-16,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPrevious studies have demonstrated functional and structural temporal lobe abnormalities located close to the auditory cortical regions in schizophrenia. The goal of this study was to determine whether functional abnormalities exist in the cortical processing of musical sound in schizophrenia.MethodsTwelve schizophrenic patients and twelve age- and sex-matched healthy controls were recruited, and participants listened to a random sequence of two kinds of sonic entities, intervals (tritones and perfect fifths) and chords (atonal chords, diminished chords, and major triads), of varying degrees of complexity and consonance. The perception of musical sound was investigated by the auditory evoked potentials technique.ResultsOur results showed that schizophrenic patients exhibited significant reductions in the amplitudes of the N1 and P2 components elicited by musical stimuli, to which consonant sounds contributed more significantly than dissonant sounds. Schizophrenic patients could not perceive the dissimilarity between interval and chord stimuli based on the evoked potentials responses as compared with the healthy controls.ConclusionThis study provided electrophysiological evidence of functional abnormalities in the cortical processing of sound complexity and music consonance in schizophrenia. The preliminary findings warrant further investigations for the underlying mechanisms.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Wu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.