Auditory, Visual, and Auditory-Visual Perception of Emotions by Individuals With Cochlear Implants, Hearing Aids, and Normal Hearing

TLDR

The study assessed how cochlear implant users of different implantation ages, hearing aid users, and normal‑hearing adolescents differ in perceiving emotions. Participants identified six basic emotions from a neutral sentence presented in auditory, visual, and combined auditory‑visual formats. Normal‑hearing participants outperformed all hearing‑loss groups in auditory emotion identification, while hearing‑loss groups showed no mode‑based differences and auditory‑visual advantage was limited to normal hearing, raising concerns about cochlear implant acoustic cue adequacy.

Abstract

This study evaluated the benefits of cochlear implant (CI) with regard to emotion perception of participants differing in their age of implantation, in comparison to hearing aid users and adolescents with normal hearing (NH). Emotion perception was examined by having the participants identify happiness, anger, surprise, sadness, fear, and disgust. The emotional content was placed upon the same neutral sentence. The stimuli were presented in auditory, visual, and combined auditory–visual modes. The results revealed better auditory identification by the participants with NH in comparison to all groups of participants with hearing loss (HL). No differences were found among the groups with HL in each of the 3 modes. Although auditory–visual perception was better than visual-only perception for the participants with NH, no such differentiation was found among the participants with HL. The results question the efficiency of some currently used CIs in providing the acoustic cues required to identify the speaker's emotional state.