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Emotional Interpretation of Music in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Literature Review

Griffith, Laura Emotional Interpretation of Music in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Literature Review. 2022. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.

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Abstract

Schizophrenia is a complex disorder defined by a broad range of symptoms. One possible symptom is a deficit in sensory processing, which can impact patients’ abilities to process both speech and music. This thesis is an in-depth literature review examining the connections between schizophrenia, musical deficits, and emotional processing. Research shows that music shares many characterisitcs with emotional human speech. Considering this connection, there is interest in how musical deficits, such as amusia (in essence, tone-deafness) may impact the ability of patients with schizophrenia to not only process emotion in music, but also in human prosodic speech. General findings include that patients with schizophrenia have higher rates of amusia, problems with melodic streaming, and deficits in pitch discrimination than healthy controls. Patients with schizophrenia also often show incongruence in their emotional responses to music compared to healthy controls. Additionally, due to similarities between music and emotional human speech, there has been some research exploring whether music could be used as an analogous measure to speech, since musical phrases are more complex than simple tone-matching tasks. A brief review on the research surrounding the experience of patients with schizophrenia in music therapy has also been conducted. Overall, it has been concluded that more research, especially longitudinal research, should be conducted on the connections between schizophrenia, musical deficits, and issues with emotional processing, as well as how these connections may impact treatment.

Item Type: Thesis
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Divisions: Radford University > College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences > Department of Psychology
Date Deposited: 29 Jun 2022 18:53
Last Modified: 20 Apr 2023 17:43
URI: http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/823

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