International Laboratory for Brain Music and Sound Research, Department of Psychology, University of Montréal, Montreal, Canada.
Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Int J Audiol. 2023 Oct;62(10):946-954. doi: 10.1080/14992027.2022.2111611. Epub 2022 Sep 1.
In daily life, failure to perceive emotional expressions can result in maladjusted behaviour. For cochlear implant users, perceiving emotional cues in sounds remains challenging, and the factors explaining the variability in patients' sensitivity to emotions are currently poorly understood. Understanding how these factors relate to auditory proficiency is a major challenge of cochlear implant research and is critical in addressing patients' limitations.
To fill this gap, we evaluated different auditory perception aspects in implant users (pitch discrimination, music processing and speech intelligibility) and correlated them to their performance in an emotion recognition task.
Eighty-four adults (18-76 years old) participated in our investigation; 42 cochlear implant users and 42 controls. Cochlear implant users performed worse than their controls on all tasks, and emotion perception abilities were correlated to their age and their clinical outcome as measured in the speech intelligibility task.
As previously observed, emotion perception abilities declined with age (here by about 2-3% in a decade). Interestingly, even when emotional stimuli were musical, CI users' skills relied more on processes underlying speech intelligibility.
These results suggest that speech processing remains a clinical priority even when one is interested in affective skills.
在日常生活中，无法感知情绪表达可能导致行为失调。对于人工耳蜗使用者来说，感知声音中的情绪线索仍然具有挑战性，目前对于解释患者对情绪敏感性差异的因素知之甚少。了解这些因素与听觉能力的关系是人工耳蜗研究的主要挑战，对于解决患者的局限性至关重要。
为了填补这一空白，我们评估了人工耳蜗使用者的不同听觉感知方面（音高辨别、音乐处理和言语可懂度），并将其与他们在情绪识别任务中的表现相关联。
84 名成年人（18-76 岁）参与了我们的调查；42 名人工耳蜗使用者和 42 名对照者。人工耳蜗使用者在所有任务上的表现均劣于对照组，并且情绪感知能力与他们的年龄和言语可懂度任务中的临床结果相关。
正如之前观察到的，情绪感知能力随年龄增长而下降（大约每十年下降 2-3%）。有趣的是，即使情绪刺激是音乐性的，人工耳蜗使用者的技能更多地依赖于言语可懂度所涉及的过程。
这些结果表明，即使对情感技能感兴趣，言语处理仍然是临床重点。
