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Everything Sounds the Same When You’re Depressed

Study shows people with depressive symptoms have trouble focusing on the speech of others when in social settings.

A group of friends invites you along to a bar. As you order a drink, one friend leans over to ask you a question. You try to focus on his speech, but all you can hear is the bartender speaking to another customer, the music playing in the background, the din of conversations surrounding you.

Experiences like this are common for many people with depression, according to new research that shows people with depression have trouble understanding the speech of others in environments with a lot of background chatter. The tendency can make these individuals feel more isolated in social settings and perpetuate the condition.

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The study, which will be presented at the 169th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this week, surveyed undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin with low and elevated symptoms of depression. Researchers had students listen to a recording of a sentence mixed with noise, and later type out what they heard to determine how accurately they perceived the speech

"We have found when you are depressed, you are more distractible and that prevents you from focusing or listening in on speech." Bharath Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders at the University of Texas-Austin and an author on the study, told Motherboard.

Although the field of psychoacoustics recognizes five basic types of emotional speech (angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral), Chandrasekaran said most speech perception studies thus far have focused neutral speech. Because of this, researchers used samples with all five kinds of speech in the study to see if it affected participants' perception. Each student underwent 50 individual tests, with 10 sentences of all five types of emotional speech. Contrary to what researchers anticipated, Chandrasekaran said depressed individuals did not have a better perception of negative emotional speech.

"We know depressed people have an increased focus on negativity, but the speech issue found in this study is not emotion-specific," he said. "We found it doesn't matter if it is emotive sentences or neutral speech, it depended on the setting."

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Background noise that affects a listener's ability to understand someone else's speech is broken down into two categories in psychoacoustics: energetic masking and informational masking. Energetic masking includes sound from outside, non-linguistic sources, such as construction noise, whereas informational masking comes from human conversation and other cognitive sources.

Researchers found depressed students performed more poorly in informational masking environments than energetic masking environments, meaning a depressed person who has trouble deciphering the words of a friend at a cocktail party wouldn't have the problem to the same degree in a construction zone.

Chandrasekaran said although it is widely acknowledged that depression, which affects approximately 121 million individuals globally, causes deficits in interpersonal communication, this particular area of research is relatively unexplored.

"There's a lot of work on the output from people who are depressed––research shows when you have major depressive disorder your cadence and emotional speech is reduced," he said. "But we don't know as much about speech perception in depressed individuals."

In the future, Chandrasekaran says the researchers want to study similar effects on individuals with a wide range of diagnosed depressive disorders.