Ana P. Pinheiro

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Lisbon

Voices carry a vast amount of information about speakers (e.g., emotional state; spatial location). Neuroimaging studies postulate that spatial (“where”) and emotional (“what”) cues are processed by partially independent processing streams. Although behavioral evidence reveals interactions between emotion and space, the temporal dynamics of these p...

Ample research explored changes in sensory feedback processing of the self-voice as well as the control of attention allocation in voice hearers, including both non-clinical voice hearers and voice hearers with a psychotic disorder. While the attentional bias toward negative emotional information in voice hearers with a psychotic disorder due to he...

Background: Hallucination-like experiences (HLEs) are untriggered sensory perceptions linked to externalizing bias - the misattribution of self-generated sensory experiences to an external source. The vulnerability to HLEs, i.e., hallucination proneness (HP), is typically assessed by the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS). A recent LSHS factor...

Hallucinations are a prominent transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom but are also prevalent in individuals who do not require clinical care. Moreover, persistent psychosis-like experience in otherwise healthy individuals may be related to an increased risk to transition to a psychotic disorder. This suggests a common etiology across clinical and non-...

Background Sensory suppression occurs when hearing one’s self-generated voice, as opposed to passively listening to one’s own voice. Quality changes in sensory feedback to the self-generated voice can increase attentional control. These changes affect the self-other voice distinction and might lead to hearing voices in the absence of an external so...

Time perception is inherently subjective and malleable. We experience a wide range of time scales, from less than a second to decades. In addition, our perception of time can be affected by our attentional and emotional states. Previous psychological and neuroimaging studies have used several paradigms and methods to probe factors that influence ti...

Background: Previous research on the multidimensionality of hallucination-like experiences (HLEs) across the psychosis continuum highlights methodological disparities, emphasizing the need for a cautious interpretation of findings and transparent reporting of parameters used in the analysis. Methods: This study aimed to refine the factorial structu...

Although emotional mimicry is ubiquitous in social interactions, its mechanisms and roles remain disputed. A prevalent view is that imitating others’ expressions facilitates emotional understanding, but the evidence is mixed and almost entirely based on facial emotions. In a preregistered study, we asked whether inhibiting orofacial mimicry affects...

As hallucinations occur in the absence of an external stimulus, they constitute an intriguing model for how percepts are generated and for how perception can fail. This study explores whether hallucination proneness is linked to an altered perception of speech-related acoustic features. Involving 320 healthy adults with varying predispositions for...

Resting state (RS) brain activity is inherently non-stationary. Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HsMM) can characterize the continuous RS data as a sequence of recurring and distinct brain states along with their spatio-temporal dynamics. Recent explorations suggest that EEG brain state dynamics in the alpha frequency link to auditory hallucination prone...

Altered sensory feedback processing and attention control are assumed to contribute to auditory verbal hallucinations, which are experienced by the general population and patients with psychosis, implying a continuum of hallucination proneness (HP). However, the interaction of altered sensory feedback processing and attention control along this HP...

Background: Sensory suppression occurs when hearing ones self-generated voice, as opposed to passively listening to ones own voice. Quality changes of sensory feedback to the self-generated voice can increase attentional control. These changes affect the self-other voice distinction and might lead to hearing non-existent voices in the absence of an...

The current meta-analysis examined the effects of valence and arousal on source memory accuracy, including the identification of variables that moderate the magnitude and direction of those effects. Fifty-three studies, comprising 85 individual experiments (N = 3,040 participants), were selected. Three separate analyses focusing on valence effects...

Both self-voice and emotional speech are salient signals that are prioritized in perception. Surprisingly, self-voice perception has been investigated to a lesser extent than the self-face. Therefore, it remains to be clarified whether self-voice prioritization is boosted by emotion, and whether self-relevance and emotion interact differently when...

The study of action observation and imagery, separately and combined, is expanding in diverse research areas (e.g., sports psychology, neurosciences), making clear the need for action-related stimuli (i.e., action statements, videos, and pictures). Although several databases of object and action pictures are available, norms on action videos are sc...

Good musical abilities are typically considered to be a consequence of music training, such that they are studied in samples of formally trained individuals. Here, we asked what predicts musical abilities in the absence of music training. Participants with no formal music training (N = 190) completed the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, mea...

Voices are a complex and rich acoustic signal processed in an extensive cortical brain network. Specialized regions within this network support voice perception and production and may be differentially affected in pathological voice processing. For example, the experience of hallucinating voices has been linked to hyperactivity in temporal and extr...

Music training has been linked to facilitated processing of emotional sounds. However, most studies have focused on speech, and less is known about musicians’ brain responses to other emotional sounds and in relation to instrument-specific experience. The current study combined behavioral and EEG methods to address two novel questions related to th...

We sought to clarify the commonly accepted link between music training and cognitive ability. Professional musicians, nonprofessionals with music training, and musically untrained individuals (N = 642) completed measures of musical ability, personality, and general cognitive ability. Professional musicians scored highest on objective and self-repor...

Previous research has documented perceptual and brain differences between spontaneous and volitional emotional vocalizations. However, the time course of emotional authenticity processing remains unclear. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to address this question, and we focused on the processing of laughter and crying. We additionally tested...

Deep learning techniques have been applied to electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, with promising applications in the field of psychiatry. Schizophrenia is one of the most disabling neuropsychiatric disorders, often characterized by the presence of auditory hallucinations. Auditory processing impairments have been studied using EEG-derived event-rel...

The human voice is a primary tool for verbal and nonverbal communication. Studies on laughter emphasize a distinction between spontaneous laughter, which reflects a genuinely felt emotion, and volitional laughter, associated with more intentional communicative acts. Listeners can reliably differentiate the two. It remains unclear, however, if they...

Alterations in the processing of vocal emotions have been associated with both clinical and non-clinical auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), suggesting that changes in the mechanisms underpinning voice perception contribute to AVH. These alterations seem to be more pronounced in psychotic patients with AVH when attention demands increase. However...

Background Positive symptoms of psychosis may be the result of faulty coordination and automatization of motor and higher-order cognitive functions, partly due to cerebellar dysfunction. Specifically, auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) have been related to altered processing of sensory feedback to one’s own action. Such alterations highlight the...

We sought to determine whether an objective test of musical ability could be successfully administered online. A sample of 754 participants was tested with an online version of the Musical Ear Test (MET), which had Melody and Rhythm subtests. Both subtests had 52 trials, each of which required participants to determine whether standard and comparis...

Sentence comprehension can be facilitated when readers anticipate the upcoming word. Notwithstanding, it remains uncertain if only the most expected word is anticipated, as postulated by the serial graded hypothesis, or if all probable words are pre-activated, as proposed by the parallel probabilistic hypothesis. To test these contrasting accounts,...

Introduction: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a cardinal symptom of schizophrenia but are also reported in the general population without need for psychiatric care. Previous evidence suggests that AVH may reflect an imbalance of prior expectation and sensory information, and that altered salience processing is characteristic of both psycho...

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities such as IQ. Although social and emotional processes are central to many musical activities, transfer from music training to socioemotional skills remains u...

Hallucinations are a prominent transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom but are also prevalent in individuals who do not require clinical care. Moreover, persistent psychosis-like experience in otherwise healthy individuals may be related to increased risk to transition to a psychotic disorder. This suggests a common etiology across clinical and non-cli...

The influence of emotion on memory has been mainly examined by manipulating the emotional valence and/or arousal of critical items. Few studies probed how emotional information presented during the encoding of critical neutral items modulates memory recognition, particularly when considering source memory features. In this study, we specified the r...

We sought to determine whether an objective test of musical ability could be administered online successfully. A sample of 754 participants was tested with an online version of the Musical Ear Test (MET), which had Melody and Rhythm subtests. Both subtests had 52 trials, each of which required participants to determine whether standard and comparis...

Self‐voice attribution can become difficult when voice characteristics are ambiguous, but functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations of such ambiguity are sparse. We utilized voice‐morphing (self‐other) to manipulate (un‐)certainty in self‐voice attribution in a button‐press paradigm. This allowed investigating how levels of self‐v...

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are reported in approximately 70% of psychotic patients, but they also may occur in approximately 10% of the healthy general population. AVH have been related to altered processing of vocal emotions at both sensory and higher-order processing stages in psychotic patients. However, it remains to be clarified whet...

The way emotional information is encoded (e.g., deciding whether it is self-related or not) has been found to affect source memory. However, few studies have addressed how the emotional quality and self-referential properties of a stimulus interactively modulate brain responses during stimulus encoding and source memory recognition. In the current...

The complexity and heterogeneity of schizophrenia symptoms challenge an objective diagnosis, which is typically based on behavioral and clinical manifestations. Moreover, the boundaries of schizophrenia are not precisely demarcated from other nosologic categories, such as bipolar disorder. The early detection of schizophrenia can lead to a more eff...

The human voice is a primary tool for verbal and nonverbal communication. Studies on laughter emphasize a distinction between spontaneous laughter, which reflects a genuinely felt emotion, and volitional laughter, associated with more intentional communicative acts. Listeners can reliably differentiate the two. It remains unclear, however, if they...

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances non-musical abilities. This has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities such as IQ. Although social and emotional processes are central to many musical activities, transfer from music training to socioemotional skills remains underexplore...

Hallucinations constitute an intriguing model of how percepts are generated and how perception can fail. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that an altered perceptual weighting of the spectro-temporal modulations that characterize speech contributes to the emergence of auditory verbal hallucinations. Healthy adults (N=168) varying in their predisp...

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) ― experienced as voice hearing independent of a corresponding external sound source ― are a cardinal symptom of psychosis. Approximately 6-13% of healthy individuals also experience voice hearing. Despite numerous attempts to explain the neurofunctional mechanisms underlying AVH, they remain notoriously unexplai...

Purpose In this study we investigated a set of 100 sentence contexts and their cloze probabilities to develop a database of linguistic stimuli for Brazilian Portuguese children and adolescents. The study also examined age-related changes on cloze probabilities, and specified the predictor effects of age and cloze probabilities on idiosyncratic resp...

Self-voice attribution can become difficult when voice characteristics are ambiguous, and functional magnetic resonance imagines (fMRI) investigations of such ambiguity are sparse. We utilized voice-morphing (self-other) to manipulate (un-)certainty in self-voice attribution in a button-press paradigm. This allowed investigating how levels of self-...

Hallucinations constitute an intriguing model of how percepts are generated and how perception can fail. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that an altered perceptual weighting of the spectro-temporal modulations that characterize speech contributes to the emergence of auditory verbal hallucinations. Healthy adults (N=168) varying in their predisp...

INTRODUÇÃO: Esta é uma reflexão que combina o olhar integrado da Psiquiatria, da Psicologia Clínica e da Neuropsicologia sobre o impacto psicossocial da pandemia por COVID-19. As secções seguintes abordam algumas das dimensões da existência humana mais afetadas pela pandemia, através de um diálogo entre duas perspetivas: o existencialismo e a ciênc...

Background Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a cardinal symptom of psychosis but are also present in 6–13% of the general population. Alterations in sensory feedback processing are a likely cause of AVH, indicative of changes in the forward model. However, it is unknown whether such alterations are related to anomalies in forming an efferenc...

The forward model monitors the success of sensory feedback to an action and link it to an efference copy originating in the motor system. The Readiness Potential (RP) of the electroencephalogram has been denoted as a neural signature of the efference copy. An open question is whether imagined sensory feedback works similarly to real sensory feedbac...

Background Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are conscious sensory experiences occurring in the absence of external stimulation. AVH are experienced by 75% of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and can manifest in other neuropsychiatric disorders. However, AVH are also reported amongst healthy individuals. This implies that hearing voices...

Background Sensory brain areas typically reduce their activity when we speak, allowing us to differentiate our own from someone else’s speech. Similarly, the amplitude of the N100 component of the EEG event-related potential in response to own speech is smaller than for passive listening to own or someone else’s speech. This amplitude suppression e...

Background Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) have been explained in the context of the forward model, giving the cerebellum a prominent role. However, research utilizing multiple neuroimaging modalities has rendered results on the specificity of cerebellar contribution to AVH unclear. Methods To examine the reliability and regional specificity...

The Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) recently held its first North American Congress, which took place in Orlando, Florida from 10-14 April 2019. The overall theme of this year's congress was United in Progress – with the aim of cultivating a collaborative effort towards advancing the field of schizophrenia research. Student trav...

The ability to recognize emotions undergoes major developmental changes from infancy to adolescence, peaking in early adulthood, and declining with aging. A life span approach to emotion recognition is lacking in the auditory domain, and it remains unclear how the speaker's and listener's ages interact in the context of decoding vocal emotions. Her...

How much acoustic signal is enough for an accurate recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations? Using a gating paradigm (7 gates from 100 to 700 ms), the current study probed the effect of stimulus duration on recognition accuracy of emotional vocalizations expressing anger, disgust, fear, amusement, sadness and neutral states. Participants (n...

Sensory suppression effects observed in electroencephalography (EEG) index successful predictions of the type and timing of self-generated sensory feedback. However, it is unclear how precise the timing prediction of sensory feedback is, and how temporal delays between an action and its sensory feedback affect perception. The current study investig...

Item memory studies show that emotional stimuli are associated with improved memory performance compared to neutral ones. However, emotion-related effects on source memory are less consistent. The current study probed how emotional valence and specific encoding conditions influence internal source memory performance and judgments of source (JOSs)....

Introduction: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a core symptom of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia but are also reported in 10–15% of the general population. Impairments in self-voice recognition are frequently reported in schizophrenia and associated with the severity of AVH, particularly when the self-voice has a negative quality....

It is widely accepted that unexpected sensory consequences of self‐action engage the cerebellum. However, we currently lack consensus on where in the cerebellum, we find fine‐grained differentiation to unexpected sensory feedback. This may result from methodological diversity in task‐based human neuroimaging studies that experimentally alter the qu...

How do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice perception. Thirty participants listened to nonverbal vocalizations coming from different locations around the head (left vs. right; front vs. back), and differing in v...

This study examined the impact of self-referential information at early stages of emotional word processing using an affective masked-priming paradigm in which positive (e.g, espetacular[awesome]) and negative (e.g., horrível[awful]) trait-adjectives were preceded by briefly primes that could be self-related (Eu sou[I am]), other-related (Ela é[She...

An increasing number of psycholinguistic studies have adopted a megastudy approach to explore the role that different variables play in the speed and/or accuracy with which words are recognised and/or pronounced in different languages. However, despite evidence for deep and shallow orthographies, little is known about the role that several orthogra...

Raw data (accuracy) from a spatial location task (Experiment 1) and emotional recognition task (Experiment 2) with nonverbal emotional vocalizations. Manuscript - "Spatial location and emotion modulate voice perception"

Demographic changes are leading to a growing older population (>65 years), with repercussions on age-related conditions. From a Computer Science perspective, this also means that there will soon be a significant number of users with changes in perceptual and motor skill capacities. The goal of this work is to develop an environment to support the p...

Background: Abnormalities in emotional prosody processing have been consistently reported in schizophrenia. Emotionally salient changes in vocal expressions attract attention in social interactions. However, it remains to be clarified how attention and emotion interact during voice processing in schizophrenia. The current study addressed this ques...

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a cardinal symptom of psychosis but also occur in 6-13% of the general population. Voice perception is thought to engage an internal forward model that generates predictions, preparing the auditory cortex for upcoming sensory feedback. Impaired processing of sensory feedback in vocalization seems to underlie...

The ability to discriminate self- and non-self voice cues is a fundamental aspect of self-awareness and subserves self-monitoring during verbal communication. Nonetheless, the neurofunctional underpinnings of self-voice perception and recognition are still poorly understood. Moreover, how attention and stimulus complexity influence the processing a...

The recognition of emotions in spoken words is one of the most important aspects in human communication and social relationships. Traditional approaches to the study of vocal emotional recognition involve instructing listeners to choose which one of several words describing emotion categories best characterize linguistically neutral utterances or v...

Background Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are one of the cardinal symptoms of psychosis but they are also present in 6–13% of individuals in the general population. Impaired predictive internal forward modelling has been proposed to underlie the experience of AVH in psychotic patients, but it remains unclear whether similar abnormalities are...

In verbal communication, affective information is commonly conveyed to others through spatial terms (e.g. in “I am feeling down”, negative affect is associated with a lower spatial location). This study used a target location discrimination task with neutral, positive and negative stimuli (words, facial expressions, and vocalizations) to test the a...

The present study aimed to clarify how listeners decode emotions from human nonverbal vocalizations, exploring unbiased recognition accuracy of vocal emotions selected from the Montreal Affective Voices (MAV) (Belin et al. in Trends Cognit Sci 8:129–135, 2008. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.01.008). The MAV battery includes 90 nonverbal vocalizations expr...

In social interactions, emotionally salient and sudden changes in vocal expressions attract attention. However, only a few studies examined how emotion and attention interact in voice processing. We investigated neutral, happy (laughs) and angry (growls) vocalizations in a modified oddball task. Participants silently counted the targets in each blo...

The experience of hallucinations is a hallmark of psychotic disorders, but they are also present in other psychiatric and medical conditions, and may be reported in nonclinical individuals. Despite the increased number of studies probing the incidence of nonclinical hallucinations, the underlying phenomenological characteristics are still poorly un...

Abnormalities in self-other voice processing have been observed in schizophrenia, and may underlie the experience of hallucinations. More recent studies demonstrated that these impairments are enhanced for speech stimuli with negative content. Nonetheless, few studies probed the temporal dynamics of self versus nonself speech processing in schizoph...

In the last decades, a growing number of studies provided compelling evidence supporting the interplay of cognitive and affective processes. However, it remains to be clarified whether and how an emotional context affects the prediction and detection of change in unattended sensory events. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, we probed the mo...

This paper describes an environment to assess auditory emotional recognition based on a mobile application. The primary aim of this work is to provide a valuable instrument that can be used both in research and clinical settings, responding to the strong need of validated measures of emotional processing, especially in Portugal. The secondary aim i...

The capacity to predict what should happen next and to minimize any discrepancy between an expected and an actual sensory input (prediction error) is a central aspect of perception. Particularly in social communication, the effective prediction of an auditory input that informs the listener about the emotionality of a speaker is critical. What is c...

Introduction: Impairments in self-other voice discrimination have been consistently reported in schizophrenia, and associated with the severity of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). This study probed the interactions between voice identity, voice acoustic quality, and semantic valence in a self-other voice discrimination task in schizophrenia...

During social communication, words and sentences play a critical role in the expression of emotional meaning. The Minho Affective Sentences (MAS) were developed to respond to the lack of a standardized sentence battery with normative affective ratings: 192 neutral, positive, and negative declarative sentences were strictly controlled for psycholing...

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a core symptom of schizophrenia. Like “real” voices, AVH carry a rich amount of linguistic and paralinguistic cues that convey not only speech, but also affect and identity, information. Disturbed processing of voice identity, affective, and speech information has been reported in patients with schizophrenia...

During speech comprehension, multiple cues need to be integrated at a millisecond speed, including semantic information, as well as voice identity and affect cues. A processing advantage has been demonstrated for self-related stimuli when compared with non-self stimuli, and for emotional relative to neutral stimuli. However, very few studies invest...