Hearing Aids Reshape Neural Processing of Emotional Speech Without Improving Emotion Perception.
Carmen Dang, Gurjit Singh, Frank A Russo
PMID 42390100WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing aids did not help older adults with hearing loss notice when the emotion in speech changed any better than listening unaided, and both were worse than normal-hearing peers.
Aided listening did change which brain areas were engaged. Only 14 hearing-aid users were tested.
Key findings
01Older adults with hearing loss heard almost three times as many presentations after the emotion changed before responding compared with normal-hearing peers when listening with their hearing aids (IRR 2.74, p = .007), and over three times as many when listening unaided (IRR 3.35, p = .003). Lower scores mean better performance on this task.
02There was no significant difference between aided and unaided listening for the hearing-loss group on the emotion-change task (IRR 1.30, p > .05), which went against the authors' hypothesis.
03Listening with hearing aids changed brain activity and connectivity compared with unaided listening in the hearing-loss group: more activity in the inferior parietal lobe, more in the medial superior frontal gyrus when unaided, and weaker connectivity between the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe with aids on. No brain measure was related to how well anyone did the task (all correlations p > .05).
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What it does not show
Only 14 hearing-aid users were tested in a single lab, so small differences between aided and unaided listening could easily have been missed. The analyses of the medial superior frontal gyrus (the largest effects in the study) rested on a smaller number of participants than the other regions, because the optodes often did not make good contact over that area. There was no control task, so the researchers cannot tell whether the group differences were specific to emotion or just general sensitivity to any change in a sound. The 'normal hearing' group was defined only by the hearing test, and older adults with normal audiograms can still have trouble processing pitch, so some of the difference between groups may be ageing rather than hearing loss. Participants wore their own hearing aids, which varied in style, brand and model, so the results reflect a mix of devices. The task used speech with no background noise and showed the emotion transition on screen (for example 'Happy to Sad'), which may have primed participants and does not match everyday listening. The authors themselves note the change-detection task may be too blunt to pick up small benefits of hearing aids. None of the brain measures were related to how well participants did the task, so the neural differences are not shown to explain the behaviour.
Declared interests
The work was supported by an NSERC-Sonova Senior Industrial Research Chair in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a grant named with Sonova. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and publication of the article.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as hearing aids being useless or harmful for emotional communication. Aided and unaided listening did not differ significantly (IRR 1.30, p > .05), only 14 hearing-aid users were tested, and the authors say a modest benefit may exist that this sample was too small to detect. Do not assume the brain findings explain the behaviour either: no brain measure correlated with how well people performed the task.
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