Your child wants to make friends and fit in with their peers, but if they have hearing loss, they may have a harder time doing so compared to other children their age. This is because, without intervention, children with hearing loss have difficulty perceiving others’ emotions, which can compromise their communication skills with other kids at Brookfield Park in Springfield.
There is good news! Hearing aids can help children with hearing loss better notice emotions in others. In this post, we review what the research shows on this topic.
About the Study
One 2021 study titled, “Hearing Status Affects Children’s Emotion Understanding in Dynamic Social Situations: An Eye-Tracking Study,” was published in the journal Ear and Hearing.
Study Objective
The objective of the study was to understand the effect of early-onset hearing loss on children’s emotional understanding. The researchers studied this by examining how children encode and interpret nonverbal emotional cues in dynamic social situations.
Study Methodology
The researchers fit children who have hearing loss with Oticon hearing aids that offer MoreSound IntelligenceTM. They then tested the children’s voice emotion recognition for anger, happiness, sadness and fear.
Study Results
They found that the children who wore hearing aids were able to more accurately recognize the emotional nuances of spoken language without relying on facial expressions. As a matter of fact, these children had a similar performance as their age-matched peers who have normal hearing: those with hearing loss had a 94% recognition level compared to 98% for those with normal hearing.
The study authors report, “The findings suggest that children with limited auditory access to the social environment tend to collect visually observable information to compensate for ambiguous emotional cues in social situations. These children may have developed this strategy to support their daily communication. Yet, to fully benefit from such a strategy, these children may need extra support for gaining better social-emotional knowledge.”
Implications for Your Child
This study shows that hearing aids can help your child be more attuned to the emotions of others, which will enable them to respond more empathetically and improve their relationships with their peers so they can build solid friendships.
To learn more about hearing aids for children or to schedule an appointment with a pediatric audiologist, call ENT Specialists Of Northern Virginia today.