Facial Expression Recognition in Children with Cochlear Implants and Hearing Aids.

Yifang Wang,Yanjie Su,Song Yan

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01989

Yifang Wang, Yanjie Su + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01989

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Abstract

Facial expression recognition (FER) is an important aspect of effective interpersonal communication. In order to explore whether the development of FER was delayed in hearing impaired children, 44 child participants completed labeling, and matching tasks to identify four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). Twenty-two participants had either a cochlear implant (CI) or a hearing aid (HA) while 22 had normal hearing and participants were matched across conditions by age and gender. The results showed that children with a CI or HA were developmentally delayed not only in their emotion-labeling (verbal) tasks but also in their emotion-matching (nonverbal) tasks. For all participants, the emotion-labeling task was more difficult than the emotion-matching task. Additionally, the relative difficulty of recognizing four different emotional expressions was similar between verbal and nonverbal tasks.

Highlights

Facial expression recognition (FER) is important for social interactions and effective communication
The results showed that children with a cochlear implant (CI) or hearing aid (HA) were developmentally delayed in the performance of both emotionlabeling and emotion-matching
These present findings contradict the prior findings of Ziv et al (2013) who found that for labeling and pointing tasks, there was no significant difference between children with a CI and hearing children

Summary

Introduction

Facial expression recognition (FER) is important for social interactions and effective communication. Hiroko and Yamaguchi (2014) found that Japanese babies between the age of 6 and 7 months were highly sensitive to angry facial expressions. This could possibly be an adaptation that might allow them to determine if they are in potentially dangerous situations. Developmental researchers used different paradigms (matching and labeling) to measure how accurately children recognized facial expressions of different emotions (Markham and Adams, 1992; Bruce et al, 2000). They found that, compared to children who were 3 to 6 years old, older children more accurately recognized facial expressions (Denham et al, 1990; Widen and Russell, 2008)

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