Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Hearing aids effectively support aging adults with hearing loss in speech intelligibility and quality of life, but hearing aids do not alleviate the difficulties in perceiving emotions in speech. These difficulties have been linked to increased feelings of loneliness and social disconnectedness, which can impact social relations and quality of life for aging adults. Hearing loss has also been associated with changes in how the brain processes emotional sounds. Brain imaging studies have underexplored the impact of hearing aids on brain function when perceiving emotions in speech because traditional scanners like fMRI are noisy and incompatible with the metal in hearing aids. Our study uses fNIRS, a silent brain imaging device which works safely with hearing aids, to study how hearing loss and hearing aids affect accuracy and brain function when older adults perceive emotion in speech. Thirty-two older adults (17 with normal hearing and 15 experienced hearing aid users) listened to and judged sentences spoken with different emotions while we measured their brain activity. Hearing aid users completed the task twice, once with their hearing aids and once without. Our results replicate previous research, those with hearing loss are worse at perceiving emotions in speech than those with normal hearing and hearing aids did not improve this deficit. Brain activity showed that people with hearing loss relied more on auditory- and movement-related brain areas to understand speech, regardless of whether they wore their hearing aids. Without their aids, they also used a more thinking-related brain region. Although wearing aids led to increased reliance on auditory- and movement-related brain areas, there was less coordination between these brain areas. The findings suggest that hearing loss changes how the brain supports emotion perception in speech and hearing aids do not fully restore the coordination between brain areas for understanding vocal emotion.