Detecting somatisation disorder via speech:introducing the Shenzhen Somatisation Speech Corpus

Objective Speech recognition technology is widely used as a mature technical approach in many fields.In the study of depression recognition,speech signals are commonly used due to their convenience and ease of acquisition.Though speech recognition is popular in the research field of depression recognition,it has been little studied in somatisation disorder recognition.The reason for this is the lack of a publicly accessible database of relevant speech and benchmark studies.To this end,we introduced our somatisation disorder speech database and gave benchmark results.Methods By collecting speech samples of somatisation disorder patients,in cooperation with the Shenzhen University General Hospital,we introduced our somatisation disorder speech database,the Shenzhen Somatisation Speech Corpus(SSSC).Moreover,a benchmark for SSSC using classic acoustic features and a machine learning model was proposed in our work.Results To obtain a more scientific benchmark,we compared and analysed the performance of different acoustic features,i.e.,the full ComPare feature set,or only Mel frequency cepstral coefficients(MFCCs),fundamental frequency(F0),and frequency and bandwidth of the formants(F1-F3).By comparison,the best result of our benchmark was the 76.0%unweighted average recall achieved by a support vector machine with formants F1–F3.Conclusion The proposal of SSSC may bridge a research gap in somatisation disorder,providing researchers with a publicly accessible speech database.In addition,the results of the benchmark could show the scientific validity and feasibility of computer audition for speech recognition in somatization disorders.

Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS): What Do Current Trainee Psychologists, Neurologists and Psychiatrists Believe?

Objectives: Medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are common in all medical settings. These conditions remain controversial, aetiology remains poorly understood and treatments have been slow to develop. This study aimed to examine the beliefs held by psychologists and other professionals about MUS, which may impact upon clinical practice. Design: 375 clinical psychology trainees from 23UKtraining courses, 12 neurologists and 19 psychiatrists in training completed a weblink survey designed to elicit a range of beliefs about MUS cause and treatment. Results: All three groups viewed MUS as a common clinical problem. Use of terminology differed between groups. All three groups held a view that sexual abuse was a medium to high risk factor for developing MUS. Only a minority of psychologists and psychiatrists doubted that the human mind is capable of massive repression for past distressing events;and few psychologists, and no psychiatrists, doubted the traditional psychodynamic causal model of MUS. Neurologists were generally more skeptical. Only a minority of all three groups disagreed that hypnosis was a helpful way to uncover memories that people can not access. Around one third of each group believed that traumatic memories recovered in therapy were reliable. Dualistic thinking was prevalent among all three groups, but more so among psychiatrists. Conclusions: The data show that many professsionals hold beliefs about MUS for which, empirical support is lacking. These beliefs may impact on clinical practice. Whether such beliefs are deemed to be correct or incorrect, they should be acknowledged.