Facial and Body Posture Emotion Identification in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Young Adults

The aim of the current study was to examine facial and body posture emotion recognition among deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) and hearing young adults. Participants were (N = 126) DHH (n = 48) and hearing (n = 78) college students who completed two emotion recognition tasks in which they were shown photographs of faces and body postures displaying different emotions of both high and low intensities and had to infer the emotion being displayed. Compared to hearing participants, DHH participants performed worse on the body postures emotion task for both high and low intensities. They also performed more poorly on the facial emotion task, but only for low-intensity emotional facial expressions. On both tasks, DHH participants whose primary mode of communication was Signed English performed significantly more poorly than those whose primary mode was American Sign Language (ASL) or spoken English. Moreover, DHH participants who communicated using ASL performed similarly to hearing participants. This suggests that difficulties in affect recognition among DHH individuals occur when processing both facial and body postures that are more subtle and reflective of real-life displays of emotion. Importantly, this also suggests that ASL as a primary form of communication in this population may serve as a protective factor against emotion recognition difficulties, which could, in part, be due to the complex nature of this language and its requirement to perceive meaning through facial and postural expressions with a wide visual lens.