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Emotion understanding in deaf children with a cochlear implant
Carin H Wiefferink1, Carolien Rieffe, Lizet Ketelaar
1Dutch Foundation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Child, Lutmastraat 167, 1073 GX Amsterdam, The Netherlands. kwiefferink@nsdsk.nl
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
|December 13, 2012
Summary
Deaf children with cochlear implants show deficits in emotion understanding compared to hearing peers. Their language skills are linked to emotion tasks, but hearing loss impacts overall emotional comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Audiology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Cochlear implantation is a common intervention for pediatric hearing loss.
- The impact of cochlear implants on emotion understanding in deaf children remains under-researched.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate emotion understanding in deaf children with cochlear implants.
- To explore the relationship between communication skills and emotion understanding in this population.
Main Methods:
- Compared emotion recognition and attribution in deaf children (n=57) and hearing children (n=52) aged 2.5-5 years.
- Assessed performance on facial expression recognition and situational emotion attribution tasks.
- Examined associations between language skills and emotion understanding.
Main Results:
- Children with cochlear implants performed less proficiently on all emotion understanding tasks compared to hearing children.
- In hearing children, language skills positively correlated with overall performance.
- In cochlear implant users, language skills were associated only with verbally demanding emotion tasks.
Conclusions:
- Pediatric hearing loss, even with cochlear implants, negatively affects multiple facets of emotion understanding.
- Nonverbal emotion understanding skills are also impacted in deaf children with cochlear implants.
- Language development plays a role in emotion understanding, particularly in verbally mediated tasks for cochlear implant users.
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