The broad aim of the research program is to develop assessment strategies by which affective deficits could be adequately differentiated within and across psychotic diagnostic entites.
The specific aims i nclude (1) generating sensitive assessment approaches to affective deficits with adequate reliability and discriminant validity; (2) cross-validating patterns of schizophrenics' and depressives' affective deficits across cultures; (3) deriving specific vocal acoustic correlates for the speech of normal controls, schizophrenics and depressives. Affective deficits seem to be neglected in the schizophrenia empirical literature and diagnostic criteria even though these deficits seem to play a prominent role in this disorder. This inconsistency may reflect the fact that the existing assessment approaches to affective deficits are compromised by reliability and discriminant validity limitations. The refinement of the assessment approaches to affective deficits in psychopathology will lead to important diagnostic, prognostic and treatment improvements. For the proposed investigation, American and Mexican schizophrenics, depressives and normal controls are interviewed to elicit intense affective expressions. The audiorecordings of the American and Mexican interviews are judged by Mexican and American judges, respectively to isolate the vocal from the verbal (content) components of their speech. Verbatim transcripts of the audiotapes are used to judge the verbal component of the speech. Finally, acoustic analyses are performed for the speech samples of all subject groups. The affective deficits will be cross- validated by (1) the interpersonal (judges' ratings) and the objective (acoustic correlates) measures of the subjects' speech and (2) the replication of expression pattern across cultures.
