Reading emotional faces in deaf and hard-of-hearing and typically hearing children

Reading emotions from other people's facial expressions is an important skill that guides social interactions. With limited auditory input and atypical emotion socialization, deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children may develop atypical processing patterns when reading emotional faces. The current study aimed at understanding whether and how DHH and typically hearing (TH) children differed at 3 emotion processing levels: gaze patterns, physiological arousal, and interpretation. Fifty-five DHH children and 72 TH children completed an emotional face matching task in which they were presented with happy, angry, fearful, and emotionally neutral faces. During the task participants' eye gazes and pupil diameter were measured by an eye-tracking device. The DHH and TH children both paid most attention to the eye region when reading emotional faces. Yet, a contrast between happy faces and nonhappy faces was observed in physiological arousal and interpretation tendency in the DHH children only: Nonhappy facial expressions were more arousing and were confused more often than happy expressions, which may reflect the DHH children being less experienced in processing nonhappy expressions due to limited access to the social environment. The results highlighted the importance of looking into the qualitative differences between typical and atypical development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).