Valence ratings of recorded media for adults with and without hearing loss.
Haiping Huang, Anne-Charlotte J Belloeil, Todd A Ricketts and 4 others
PMID 42557792WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with hearing loss rated recorded media as less pleasant than typical-hearing peers only when surround sound was used or when dialogue was closer to background level.
Raising dialogue above background improved pleasantness. Surround sound did not help.
Key findings
01Older adults with hearing loss rated recorded media as less pleasant than typical-hearing peers only in surround sound and when dialogue was closer to background level.
02Increasing dialogue level relative to background increased pleasantness ratings in audio-only and audiovisual tests.
03With audiovisual clips, older adults with hearing loss still rated surround sound and lower dialogue-to-background ratio clips as less pleasant than older typical-hearing adults.
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What it does not show
No younger adults with hearing loss were tested, so the hearing-loss findings apply only to older adults. Participants with hearing loss did not use hearing aids, so the results do not show how hearing aids might change emotional response. The findings are for short clips from dialogue-heavy television and movie material, so they may not apply to other media genres. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 used different clips, so the study cannot directly separate the effect of adding visual cues from the effect of different content. Valence ratings may have been influenced by perceived sound quality or intelligibility, which were not analysed in this paper. Some older participants had slight hearing asymmetry by stricter criteria, which may have affected spatial hearing and group differences. The listening was done in a sound booth, not in participants' homes, so real-world TV listening conditions may differ.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict-of-interest declaration appears in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing loss makes all recorded media less pleasant. The lower pleasantness ratings occurred only in surround sound and when dialogue was closer to background level.