Hearing aid fitting and daily life emotions
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The impact of hearing aid fitting on the affective experience of daily life.
IRAS ID
305736
Contact name
Jack A Holman
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Nottingham
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 9 months, 1 days
Research summary
Summary of Research
Hearing loss can cause substantial negative psychosocial impacts. Emotional responses in situations where hearing matters play an important role in determining satisfaction with hearing and perseverance with hearing aids. Meanwhile, we know very little about the specific causes of positive and negative emotional reactions to daily-life listening situations and to hearing aids. To examine the effect of hearing aid fitting on emotions we will measure emotion in participants before and after first-ever hearing aid fitting. Participants will be due to be fitted with their first-ever hearing aid(s). Participants will complete a baseline survey involving questionnaires that assess self-reported hearing handicap, trait emotions, social activity level and restrictions. Participants will then complete a baseline session of smartphone based surveys over the course of eleven days (before hearing aid fitting). There are eight short (<2 minutes) surveys per day: one morning, one evening and six daytime surveys at random times in between. These surveys ask about current listening activities and emotions. Participants will then complete another eleven day session of smartphone surveys three months after the hearing aid fitting. The data will be analysed using multi-level analysis. The hypothesis is that emotional valence and arousal will be higher after hearing aid fitting than before, particularly in conversational situations. It is expected that lower trait emotion scores and higher social activity scores will be linked to larger beneficial changes in emotion. Improvements in baseline measures will be in line with improvements in emotion.Summary of Results
It was predicted that emotions experienced in daily life listening situations would be "improved" following hearing aid fitting. We found that this was the case for both valence (positive/negative) and arousal (low/high) across the group as a whole, displaying the positive effect of hearing aids on emotional experience. This was supported by evidence from the reported discrete emotions (the main emotion felt in a situation e.g. enjoyment). However, in keeping with a prior study, there were differences between individuals. Some participants experienced a large increase in positive emotions, other experienced virtually none. For arousal, a selection of participants reported lower arousal following fitting. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the reasons should be investigated in future research.Another interesting finding was that prior to fitting, participants did not generally rate that they were feeling "negative" very often (1-3), rather they were more likely not to be feeling positive (5-7). This is unlike the prior study where experienced hearing aid users often felt negatively in situations when not wearing hearing aids. This is likely due to the patients not being fully aclimatised to their new hearing aids yet.
REC name
West of Scotland REC 3
REC reference
22/WS/0021
Date of REC Opinion
2 Mar 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion