Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 16, 2025
Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
Cochlear-implant simulated spectral degradation attenuates emotional responses to environmental sounds
Kelly N Jahn1,2, Braden M Wiegand-Shahani1,2, Vaishnavi Moturi1
1Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA.
Objective:
Cochlear implants (CI) provide users with a spectrally degraded acoustic signal that could impact their auditory emotional experiences. This study evaluated the effects of CI-simulated spectral degradation on emotional valence and arousal elicited by environmental sounds.
Design:
Thirty emotionally evocative sounds were filtered through a noise-band vocoder. Participants rated the perceived valence and arousal elicited by each of the full-spectrum and vocoded stimuli. These ratings were compared across acoustic conditions (full-spectrum, vocoded) and as a function of stimulus type (unpleasant, neutral, pleasant).
Study Sample:
Twenty-five young adults (age 19 to 34 years) with normal hearing.
Results:
Emotional responses were less extreme for spectrally degraded (i.e., vocoded) sounds than for full-spectrum sounds. Specifically, spectrally degraded stimuli were perceived as more negative and less arousing than full-spectrum stimuli.
Conclusion:
By meticulously replicating CI spectral degradation while controlling for variables that are confounded within CI users, these findings indicate that CI spectral degradation can compress the range of sound-induced emotion independent of hearing loss and other idiosyncratic device- or person-level variables. Future work will characterize emotional reactions to sound in CI users via objective, psychoacoustic, and subjective measures.
