Effects of Increasing the Overall Level or Fitting Hearing Aids on Emotional Responses to Sounds

Abstract

Adults with hearing loss demonstrate a reduced range of emotional responses to nonspeech sounds compared to their peers with normal hearing. The purpose of this study was to evaluate two possible strategies for addressing the effects of hearing loss on emotional responses: (a) increasing overall level and (b) hearing aid use (with and without nonlinear frequency compression, NFC). Twenty-three adults (mean age = 65.5 years) with mild-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss and 17 adults (mean age = 56.2 years) with normal hearing participated. All adults provided ratings of valence and arousal without hearing aids in response to nonspeech sounds presented at a moderate and at a high level. Adults with hearing loss also provided ratings while using individually fitted study hearing aids with two settings (NFC-OFF or NFC-ON). Hearing loss and hearing aid use impacted ratings of valence but not arousal. Listeners with hearing loss rated pleasant sounds as less pleasant than their peers, confirming findings in the extant literature. For both groups, increasing the overall level resulted in lower ratings of valence. For listeners with hearing loss, the use of hearing aids (NFC-OFF) also resulted in lower ratings of valence but to a lesser extent than increasing the overall level. Activating NFC resulted in ratings that were similar to ratings without hearing aids (with a moderate presentation level) but did not improve ratings to match those from the listeners with normal hearing. These findings suggest that current interventions do not ameliorate the effects of hearing loss on emotional responses to sound.

Emotional Responses to Non-Speech Sounds for Hearing-aid and Bimodal Cochlear-Implant Listeners

“…The purpose of this project was two-fold: 1) to evaluate the between-group differences in emotional responses to non-speech sounds between listeners with normal hearing, hearing aid candidates, and bimodal cochlear-implant listeners and 2) to evaluate the effects of device configuration on emotional responses to non-speech sounds. Consistent with previous work ( Picou, 2016 ; Picou & Buono, 2018 ; Picou, Rakita, et al, 2021 ), ratings of arousal were largely unaffected by hearing loss or device configuration. The limited findings related to ratings of arousal might be due to the importance of level as a cue for arousal ( Buono et al, 2021 ; Ma et al, 2012 ) and listeners with hearing loss were always tested with an assistive hearing device, potentially limiting differences in loudness between groups.…”

“…The results of this study replicate those by ( Picou, 2016 ; Picou, Rakita, et al, 2021 ), demonstrating that listeners with hearing loss exhibited reduced ratings of valence in response to non-speech sounds. The results also extend existing literature by demonstrating that bimodal CI listeners exhibit emotional responses that are similar to their HA-candidate peers.…”

“…Of these 167 tokens, 75 were used in this study. The 75 tokens were the same ones used by our previous studies ( Picou, 2016 ; Picou & Buono, 2018 ; Picou, Rakita, et al, 2021 ). The tokens were modified from their original format in two ways.…”

“…Instead, HAs reduced ratings of valence in response to all categories of sounds (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant). Thus, although HAs improve audibility of sounds and would be expected to improve ratings of valence, the improvement in audibility might be offset by the increased loudness of sounds with hearing aids; loud sounds have been shown to result in low ratings of valence, even if the sounds are expected to be pleasant ( Atias et al, 2019 ; Picou, 2016 ; Picou, Rakita, et al, 2021 ).…”

“…To evaluate the effects of group membership, three groups of listeners were tested with a standard-of-care intervention (no device, bilateral HAs, or bimodal CI configuration). It was expected that, relative to their peers with NH, both groups would demonstrate ratings of valence that were less extreme (less pleasant and less unpleasant), even while using assistive hearing device technology, due to the continued difficulties with emotion perception adults exhibit with hearing aids (e.g., Goy et al, 2018 ; Picou, Rakita, et al, 2021 ; Singh et al., 2019 ) and cochlear implants ( Caldwell et al, 2015 ; D’Onofrio et al, 2020 ; Jiam et al, 2017 ). Furthermore, based on the noted reduced range with increasing pure-tone average ( Picou & Buono, 2018 ), it was expected that bimodal CI listeners would demonstrate larger deficits (smaller range of emotional responses) than HA candidates, who typically have lesser degrees of hearing loss.…”