Wearing hearing aids can make users more intensity-sensitive than age-normal hearing peers.

Evidence

Hearing aid users wearing their hearing aid generally showed the same pattern of affect ratings as participants with age-normal hearing, especially for the valence dimension. However, for arousal ratings, those wearing a hearing aid were actually more sensitive to intensity differences than participants in the reference group. This may be because hearing in the reference group was normal for their age, but still implied elevated high-frequency thresholds. Consequently, older adults in the reference group were less sensitive, at least to some acoustic differences, than the hearing aid users. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1377

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: Why would amplification increase sensitivity beyond normal? Is it neural recruitment, or the reference group’s elevated high-frequency thresholds masking differences?

Related

• Age-normal hearing can be less sensitive to intensity than aided impaired hearing (similarity 0.95)
• Wearing a hearing aid normalizes arousal ratings across differing degrees of hearing loss. (similarity 0.86)
• Hearing aids normalize affect ratings across differing hearing loss severities (similarity 0.86)
• Hearing aids largely restore affect perception to age-normal levels (similarity 0.86)
• Amplification only compensates for elevated thresholds, not other perceptual deficits from hearing loss. (similarity 0.84)
• Hearing aid users’ affect perception is tested aided and unaided against normal-hearing controls (similarity 0.84)
• Even slight hearing losses of 16-25 dB HL may benefit from hearing aids. (similarity 0.84)
• Hearing aid use restores arousal perception but shifts cue weighting (similarity 0.84)
• Hearing-impaired listeners need higher signal-to-noise ratios than normal hearers do (similarity 0.83)
• Hearing loss can impair affect perception in ways hearing aids may not fully restore (similarity 0.83)
• Arousal and valence perception recruit distinct acoustic mechanisms (similarity 0.83)
• Hearing aids do not change affective valence perception but do alter arousal perception (similarity 0.83)
• Hearing loss severity drives listeners toward alternative acoustic cues for arousal (similarity 0.82)
• Pure level changes are rated as valuable as SNR changes despite not aiding intelligibility (similarity 0.82)
• Recruitment-induced loudness discomfort in aided listeners is a level artifact, not hypersensitivity (similarity 0.82)