Examining Emotion Perception in Cochlear Implant Users
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Examining emotion perception in speech and music in cochlear implant users and normally-hearing listeners
IRAS ID
192715
Contact name
Tim Metcalfe
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The primary aim is to investigate how adult cochlear implant users' performance in auditory emotion recognition tasks is affected when different acoustic cues (pitch, tempo, loudness) are systematically normalised (i.e. variance in these parameters is artifically attenuated via auditory processing). This will provide an insight into the type of information that CI users rely on, and both the general and emotion-specific listening strategies adopted when CI users experience emotional speech and music. The experiment will also investigate the degree to which their ability to perceive emotions improves with learning.
A group of at least sixteen adult CI users will be recruited via STH NHS trust, NHS PIC centres, user groups who have consented to third party contact and via other cochlear implant centres who have consent to send third party requests for research recruitment once appropriate ethical approvals are in place.
Stimuli from a prior experiment will be used, consisting of short excerpts of speech and brief musical melodies, each expressing one of five emotions (Anger, Fear, Happiness, Sadness or Neutral). These are processed in order to produce different versions wherein Frequency (pitch), Intensity or Duration cues are systematically normalised. In total, there are 200 speech stimuli and 200 musical stimuli.
During the proposed study, CI users will first listen to a subset of the stimuli, containing all emotions and processing conditions in equal proportion, (speech for one half of the participants and music for the other half) and make perceptual judgments about the emotion expressed by each stimulus. During this task participants will receive onscreen written feedback – i.e. whether their response is correct or incorrect, and which emotion was expressed. Following this training period, participants will perform the same task with a novel set of stimuli, this time without any feedback, to test the extent that practice can improve emotion recognition performance.
REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/LO/1197
Date of REC Opinion
19 Jul 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion