Hearing aid users’ affect perception is tested aided and unaided against normal-hearing controls

Evidence

The current study investigates whether hearing aids restore affect perception, and how hearing loss in older adults influences affect perception. In particular, this study focuses on the question to what extent hearing aid use and hearing loss influence listeners’ sensitivity to the acoustic parameters cueing affect. To that end, older (bilateral) hearing aid users are tested while wearing their hearing aid (aided condition) and without it (unaided condition). The relation between the acoustic parameters and the affect ratings are then evaluated for the two listening conditions. Moreover, the performance in the aided condition is compared to a control group of age-matched normal-hearing listeners. Participants will be tested on natural conversational speech stimuli in order to mimic realistic listening conditions. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1356

All participants performed the rating tasks in two conditions. For the hearing aid users, these two conditions were with (aided) and without their hearing aids (unaided). The normal-hearing participants completed the tasks in a normal listening condition and in a condition with simulated hearing loss (data of the latter condition are not reported here). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1365

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader line of research on how degraded auditory input affects emotional prosody processing in older adults.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1356; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1365