Facial Expression Recognition in Children with Cochlear Implants and Hearing Aids

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.