Speech Graphs Provide a Quantitative Measure of Thought Disorder in Psychosis
Background: Psychosis has various causes, including mania and schizophrenia. Since the differential diagnosis of psychosis is exclusively based on subjective assessments of oral interviews with patients, an objective quantification of the speech disturbances that characterize mania and schizophren...
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Principais autores: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | article |
Idioma: | eng |
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Endereço do item: | https://repositorio.ufrn.br/jspui/handle/123456789/23273 |
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Resumo: | Background: Psychosis has various causes, including mania and schizophrenia. Since the differential diagnosis of psychosis
is exclusively based on subjective assessments of oral interviews with patients, an objective quantification of the speech
disturbances that characterize mania and schizophrenia is in order. In principle, such quantification could be achieved by
the analysis of speech graphs. A graph represents a network with nodes connected by edges; in speech graphs, nodes
correspond to words and edges correspond to semantic and grammatical relationships.
Methodology/Principal Findings: To quantify speech differences related to psychosis, interviews with schizophrenics,
manics and normal subjects were recorded and represented as graphs. Manics scored significantly higher than
schizophrenics in ten graph measures. Psychopathological symptoms such as logorrhea, poor speech, and flight of
thoughts were grasped by the analysis even when verbosity differences were discounted. Binary classifiers based on
speech graph measures sorted schizophrenics from manics with up to 93.8% of sensitivity and 93.7% of specificity. In
contrast, sorting based on the scores of two standard psychiatric scales (BPRS and PANSS) reached only 62.5% of
sensitivity and specificity.
Conclusions/Significance: The results demonstrate that alterations of the thought process manifested in the speech of
psychotic patients can be objectively measured using graph-theoretical tools, developed to capture specific features of the
normal and dysfunctional flow of thought, such as divergence and recurrence. The quantitative analysis of speech graphs is
not redundant with standard psychometric scales but rather complementary, as it yields a very accurate sorting of
schizophrenics and manics. Overall, the results point to automated psychiatric diagnosis based not on what is said, but on
how it is said. |
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