Vocal emotion identification and quality of life in adult cochlear implant users

Abstract

Self-report quality of life questionnaires, such as the Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire (NCIQ), are increasingly paired with speech intelligibility tasks to assess cochlear implant (CI) outcomes. Previous research [Luo et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 144, EL429–EL435 (2018)] found that vocal emotion identification was positively correlated with the six NCIQ subdomains. The current study attempted to replicate and extend previous findings, using similar procedures with a new sample of CI listeners. Eighteen postlingually implanted adults were randomly presented with 10 semantically neutral sentences spoken by one female talker expressing one of five emotions (happy, sad, angry, scared, and neutral). In addition to NCIQ, participants completed SSQ12 and HHIE. The overall emotion identification accuracy was 66% correct. No significant associations were found between emotion identification and any NCIQ or HHIE subscales. There were significant positive correlations between emotion identification and SSQ12 (spatial subscale and total score). The present NCIQ results diverged from the previous findings, suggesting at best a tenuous relationship between emotion identification quality-of-life measures. However, the reduced emotion identification scores of CI users suggest that these tasks may have clinical utility in CI assessment and rehabilitation.