Hearing Impairment and Emotion Identification from Auditory and Visual Stimuli

In the present pilot study, the researchers investigated how people with impaired hearing identify emotions from auditory and visual stimuli, with people with normal hearing acting as their controls. Two separate experiments were conducted. The viewpoint was in the communication and social function of emotion perception. Professional actors of both genders produced emotional nonsense samples without linguistic content, samples in the Finnish language, and prolonged vowel samples. In Experiment 1, nine Cochlear implant users and nine controls participated in the listening test. In Experiment 2, nine users of a variety of hearing aids and nine controls participated in the perception test. The results of both experiments showed a statistically significant difference between the two testing groups, people with hearing impairment and people with normal hearing, in the emotion identification and valence perception from both auditory and visual stimuli. The results suggest that hearing aids and cochlear implants do not transfer well enough the nuances within emotions conveyed by the voice. The results also suggest difficulties in the visual perception among people with hearing impairment. This warrants further studies with larger samples.