Severe hearing loss hinders recognition of emotions of others

Hearing impaired children and adolescents have difficulty recognizing and understanding the reaction of others in certain situations.

An Australian study involving 163 children aged between 6 and 18 years found that children with hearing loss were up to 50 percent less able than their hearing peers to interpret the feelings of other people. Understanding people whose emotional response was different than expected presented the greatest challenge for the hearing impaired children. In this respect hearing impaired children aged 6 to 11 years were 50 percent below the performance of their hearing peers. Hearing impaired youngsters generally have trouble judging the expected emotional response of others to a certain event. The study found their ability in this respect to be 30 percent below that of normal hearing youngsters. Another test indicated a 25 percent deficiency among the hearing impaired children in rapid and accurate interpretation of the meaning of somebody else’s facial expressions. The researchers behind the study consider the lack of emotion recognition among the hearing impaired children to be a significant problem. In most instances, however, targeted training programmes would help correct this condition and in most cases improve the hearing impaired youngsters’ social skills. Sources: Emotion Recognition/Understanding Ability in Hearing or Vision-impaired Children: Do Sounds, Sights, or Words Make the Difference?, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, No. 4 2004.