Senescent Decline in Verbal-Emotion Identification by Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners – Do Hearing Aids Help?

Figures & data

Figure 1 Individual (thin lines) and mean (thick line) audiograms for the better ear of the 29 older-adult hearing-impaired (OHI) listeners. The grey-shaded area represents ±1 standard deviation (SD).

Figure 2 Percentage of listeners correctly identifying each of the six emotional states, and percentage of correct identification across all emotional states (All) for the YNH listeners, and the OHI listeners when unaided (OHI_unaided) and when aided through their own bilateral HAs (OHI_aided). The emotional states are presented, from left to right, in order of the size of the impact of the HAs on emotion perception in the OHI listeners.

Table 1 Correlations Between Each of the Listener-Related Factors of Age, PTA, and Self-Adjusted Presentation Level and Verbal-Emotion-Perception Performance in the Unaided and Aided Listening Conditions

	Bivariate Correlations		Partial Correlations
	Unaided	Aided	Unaided	Aided
Age (years)	–0.70 (<0.001)	–0.61 (<0.001)	–0.67 (<0.001)	–0.65 (<0.001)
PTA (dB HL)	–0.28 (0.136)	–0.04 (0.819)	–0.06 (0.768)	+0.30 (0.120)
Level (dB SPL)	–0.15 (0.449)	–0.13 (0.495)	+0.08 (0.707)	–0.15 (0.457)

Notes: Bivariate (left two columns) and partial (right two columns) Pearson correlation coefficients are shown with associated P values (uncorrected for multiple comparisons) given in parentheses. For each factor, partial correlations are computed by controlling the two other factors. Significant results are shown in bold.

Abbreviations: PTA, pure tone average between 500 and 4000 Hz in the better ear; dB HL, decibel hearing level; dB SPL, decibel sound pressure level.