Emotion Perception in Children with Cochlear Implants and with Hearing Aids

Emotion recognition is an important part of human communication and this ability contributes to children’s social development. Children with hearing loss may have difficulties perceiving relevant acoustic cues conveying emotions, but the combined effects of neuroplasticity, physiological effects from hearing loss, and the compensatory features of hearing aids and cochlear implants are not fully understood. As a result, it is also unclear if difficulties in vocal emotion perception are mostly due to a reduced access to relevant acoustic cues, an acute effect. Additionally, the ability to recognize and label emotions may develop differently in children with hearing loss, an accumulated effect over a longer period of time that may be less directly related to hearing difficulties. We will present findings from recent studies on vocal emotion recognition from semantically meaningless sentences in children (6–18 years) with cochlear implants or with hearing aids, and preliminary results from ongoing work on both vocal and facial emotion recognition in hearing aided children (6–18 years). These data show a large variability in performance, indicating some children with hearing loss mayhave great difficulties. We will discuss potentially relevant contributing factors in the development of emotion perception in children with hearing loss.