SRF301 - Recognition of Auditory Social-Emotional Cues in Aided and Normal Hearing Adults

Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to evaluate recognition of vocal social communication in adults with and without hearing loss, using stimuli that represent various vocal emotions (e.g., angry versus happy) and potentially more nuanced intent (e.g., sarcasm, white lie, joking, indirect request). The results of this study will help elucidate the effects of hearing loss and amplification on recognition of prosody features that cue for social communication. Future work is warranted to evaluate interventions that address prosody recognition difficulties, such as the fitting of hearing aid features, and to understand the implications of these findings on patients’ real-life experiences.

Summary:
Rationale
Most studies of the communication difficulties experienced by adults with sensorineural hearing loss focus on speech understanding, particularly in noise. Yet, spoken communication is often social in nature, with conversational partners expressing distinct emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, happiness) or conveying nuanced communication (e.g., sarcasm, jokes, sincerity) through fluctuations in vocal properties. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the identification of auditory social communication by adults with and without hearing loss using stimuli that represent basic and complex emotions in addition to more nuanced communicative intent (sarcasm, white lie, joking, and indirect requests). The results of this study have the potential to contribute to the existing literature by differentiating the effects of hearing loss and hearing aids on the recognition of auditory social-emotional cues.

Design:
Adult participants (aged 55 – 80 years) with and without hearing loss completed laboratory-based evaluations of social communication recognition using various corpora of talkers conveying basic emotions and nuanced intentions. Following fitting with study hearing aids and a hearing aid acclimatization period, hearing aid users completed testing twice, once with and once without the study hearing aids. Adults with normal hearing completed testing once without hearing aids. Testing included a closed-set task wherein participants listened to a sentence and chose the most likely emotion or intent using a graphical-user interface in custom-built software. They also rated their confidence in their ability to recognize the speaker’s social communication. For each type of emotion or nuanced intent, task performance and confidence ratings were analyzed using linear mixed-effects modeling. For the models, each participant was included as a random intercept, while group and intended emotions were included as fixed factors of interest.

Preliminary

Results:
Preliminary results indicate that hearing aid benefits for recognizing social communication vary across emotions. However, even with access to visual cues, listeners with hearing loss generally performed more poorly compared to participants with normal hearing on tasks of both basic emotion and nuanced intent recognition. Hearing aid use can improve recognition of some of the social communication intents. However, for some emotions, differences between adults with and without hearing loss persist, even when the adults with hearing loss are wearing hearing aids. Finally, ratings of recognition confidence do not seem to vary by group, suggesting that adults with and without hearing loss may be approximately equally confident in their ability to hear communicative intent and vocal emotional expressions, despite differences in performance.

Preliminary

Conclusions:
Adults with hearing loss might struggle with recognizing the social intent in the vocal expression of conversational partners, even when they are wearing hearing aids. Based on the differences in findings for recognition accuracy and recognition confidence, it is possible that adults with hearing loss are unaware of some of the difficulties they are experiencing in detecting differences in basic and nuanced communicative intent. Future work is warranted to continue evaluating the acoustic cues that inform social communication in order to optimize interventions that can address prosody recognition difficulties associated with hearing loss.

Brief Summary of Clinical Takeaways:
The clinical takeaway for this session is that while hearing aids restore access to speech understanding, the effect on social-emotional communication varies across emotion or intent. This research may inform future counseling decisions for practitioners working adult hearing aid patients, particularly when interpersonal communication is a patient concern.