Hearing aid use restores arousal perception but shifts cue weighting

Evidence

For arousal, hearing-aid users rated utterances as generally more aroused in the aided than in the unaided condition. Intensity differences were the strongest indictor of degree of arousal. Among the hearing-aid users, those with poorer hearing used additional prosodic cues (i.e., tempo and pitch) for their arousal ratings, compared to those with relatively good hearing. For valence, pitch was the only acoustic cue that was associated with valence. Neither listening condition nor hearing loss severity (differences among the hearing-aid users) influenced affect ratings or the use of affect-related acoustic parameters. Compared to the normal-hearing reference group, ratings of hearing-aid users in the aided condition did not generally differ in both emotion dimensions. However, hearing-aid users were more sensitive to intensity differences in their arousal ratings than the normal-hearing participants. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1348

For arousal, mean intensity was found to be a strong cue for arousal rating (β= 6.606 × 10‑2 , SE = 1.528 × 10‑2 , p < 0.001): higher intensity was associated with higher ratings of arousal in the aided and unaided conditions. Moreover, arousal ratings were generally higher in the aided condition than in the unaided condition (mapped on the intercept) (β= 7.156 × 10‑2 , SE = 2.089 × 10‑2 , p < 0.001). Significant interactions between listening condition and articulation rate (β = 3.012 × 10‑2 , SE = 1.421 × 10‑2 , p < 0.05) and listening condition and vocal effort (β = 1.459 × 10‑2 , SE = 3.949 × 10‑3 , p < 0.001) were observed: while vocal effort and articulation rate did not influence ratings in the unaided condition, their effects were larger in the aided condition. … In the unaided condition, those with poorer hearing had lower ratings (β = ‑9.772 × 10‑3 , SE = 4.093 × 10‑3 , p < 0.05) than those with better hearing, but this was less the case in the aided condition (β = 7.063 × 10‑3 , SE = 2.459 × 10‑3 , p < 0.01). This suggests that wearing the hearing aid made the rating patterns of poorer and better-hearing participants more alike. … For valence, a significant simple effect of mean F0 (β = ‑4.813 × 10‑3 , SE = 8.856 × 10‑4 , p < 0.001) was found: higher pitch was associated with lower ratings, i.e., more negative ratings. None of the other acoustic parameters was predictive of the valence ratings. Moreover, importantly, no effects for listening condition and hearing loss were observed: valence ratings were independent of whether the participants wore their hearing aids or not and were independent of individual hearing loss. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1371

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theme that hearing loss is not merely loss of audibility but loss of prosodic/affective information — parallels how reduced sensory bandwidth changes affective decoding. — connects to: Poorer hearing drives reliance on more prosodic cues for affect judgement — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1348; Wearing a hearing aid normalizes arousal ratings across differing degrees of hearing loss.; Hearing loss severity drives listeners toward alternative acoustic cues for arousal — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1377 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Why would hearing-aid users become more sensitive to intensity differences than normal-hearing listeners? Is this a compensation/attentional effect or an artifact of hearing-aid compression curves?
• DEFINE: Clarifies the arousal/valence distinction as the two perceptual axes of speaker emotion carried by different acoustic parameters.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1348; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1371

Broader Connections

• Wearing a hearing aid normalizes arousal ratings across differing degrees of hearing loss. #corroborates (0.90)
• Hearing loss severity drives listeners toward alternative acoustic cues for arousal #expands (0.85) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1377
• Hearing aids largely restore affect perception to age-normal levels #corroborates (0.80) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1381
• Hearing aid algorithms distort auditory cues yet still improve speech understanding #complicates (0.75) — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1777
• Hearing aids address audibility, recruitment, and noise but not resolution deficits #qualifies (0.75)