Emotion to our ears: Hearing aids that amplify all sound levels might restore the ability to hear emotion in voices

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-07-17 04:00

International

Image caption: For adults with hearing loss, linear amplification (amplification across all sound levels, available with some hearing aids) might restore their ability to recognize emotion in voices. Image credit: Mark Paton, Unsplash, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

Swedish researchers suggest that people with hearing loss may be able to better or regain their ability to recognise emotion in the voices of others by using hearing aids that are capable of linear amplification - amplification across all sound levels. The team asked 21 experienced hearing aid users and 20 people with normal hearing to try and recognise emotion from spoken sentences. The people wearing hearing aids that had linear amplification were significantly more likely to recognise happiness, the researchers say, as well as having better scores for recognising non-verbal vocalisations such as fear and anger.

Journal/
conference: PLOS One

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Linköping University, Sweden

Funder: Örjan Dahlström was partly funded through a grant from The Swedish Association of Hard of Hearing People. Ref 2016-531. https://hrf.se/

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