Helping hands? Gesture and self-repair in schizophrenia

Successful social encounters require mutual understanding between interacting partners, and patients with schizophrenia are known to experience difficulties in social interaction. Several studies have shown that in general people compensate for verbal difficulties by employing additional multimodal resources such as hand gesture. We hypothesise that this will be impaired in patients with schizophrenia, and present a preliminary study to address this question. The results show that during social interaction, schizophrenia patients repair their own speech less. In addition, although increased hand gesture is correlated with increased self-repair in healthy controls, there is no such association in patients with schizophrenia, or their interlocutors. This suggests that multimodal impairments are not merely seen on an individual level but may be a feature of patients’ social encounters.

[1]  D. Guthrie,et al.  Conversational repair in schizophrenic and normal children. , 1996, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

[2]  Philip Thomas,et al.  Self-repair in dialogues of schizophrenics: Effects of hallucinations and negative symptoms , 1992, Brain and Language.

[3]  Patrick G. T. Healey,et al.  The Distribution of Repair in Dialogue , 2011, CogSci.

[4]  E. Schegloff,et al.  The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation , 1977 .

[5]  S. Kay,et al.  The positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS) for schizophrenia. , 1987, Schizophrenia bulletin.

[6]  Stuart Adam Battersby,et al.  How listeners respond to speaker's troubles , 2013, CogSci.

[7]  Matthew Purver,et al.  On Incrementality in Dialogue: Evidence from Compound Contributions , 2011, Dialogue Discourse.

[8]  D Hemsley,et al.  Verbal self-monitoring and auditory verbal hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia , 2001, Psychological Medicine.

[9]  Matthew Purver,et al.  Strongly Incremental Repair Detection , 2014, EMNLP.

[10]  P. Healey,et al.  Shared understanding in psychiatrist-patient communication: association with treatment adherence in schizophrenia. , 2013, Patient education and counseling.

[11]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  Gestures and Self-Monitoring in Speech Production , 2001 .

[12]  Vijay A. Mittal,et al.  Mismatch and lexical retrieval gestures are associated with visual information processing, verbal production, and symptomatology in youth at high risk for psychosis , 2014, Schizophrenia Research.

[13]  Christine Howes,et al.  When Words Fail: Collaborative Gestures During Clarification Dialogues , 2015, AAAI Spring Symposia.

[14]  S. Brennan,et al.  How Listeners Compensate for Disfluencies in Spontaneous Speech , 2001 .

[15]  Mary Lavelle,et al.  Participation during First Social Encounters in Schizophrenia , 2014, PloS one.

[16]  John J. Godfrey,et al.  SWITCHBOARD: telephone speech corpus for research and development , 1992, [Proceedings] ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[17]  H. Ellgring,et al.  Nonverbal expression of psychological states in psychiatric patients , 2004, European archives of psychiatry and neurological sciences.

[18]  R. McCabe,et al.  Non‐verbal communication in meetings of psychiatrists and patients with schizophrenia , 2015, Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica.

[19]  M. Compton,et al.  Premorbid functioning of patients with first-episode nonaffective psychosis: A comparison of deterioration in academic and social performance, and clinical correlates of Premorbid Adjustment Scale scores , 2008, Schizophrenia Research.

[20]  C. Goodwin.  The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation , 1979 .

[21]  Matthew Purver,et al.  Helping, I Mean Assessing Psychiatric Communication: An Application of Incremental Self-Repair Detection , 2014 .

[22]  Jean Addington,et al.  Social and cognitive functioning in psychosis , 2008, Schizophrenia Research.

[23]  W. Levelt,et al.  Monitoring and self-repair in speech , 1983, Cognition.

[24]  Mary Lavelle,et al.  Is Nonverbal Communication Disrupted in Interactions Involving Patients With Schizophrenia? , 2012, Schizophrenia bulletin.