The Role of Auditory Status and Emotion Intensity in Facial Emotion Recognition by Adolescents

Poor emotion recognition has been linked to social and emotional problems in everyday life. This may particularly affect teenagers navigating social scenes in adolescence, when peers become more important than family, and those with disabilities like hearing loss that may affect emotion recognition. This study investigates the effect of auditory status (deaf or hard of hearing using cochlear implant, CI, versus typical hearing, TH) on visual emotion recognition in adolescents, and its association with social relationships. Participants included 24 adolescents with TH (M = 13.7 years) and 34 adolescent long-term CI users (M = 13.3 years). Adolescents completed an emotion recognition task viewing video clips of faces morphing from a neutral expression to six facial expressions at 60, 80, or 100% emotion intensities via a gating task, and questionnaires about social relationships. Adolescents with TH significantly outperformed the CI group in the 80% emotion intensity condition (p = 0.02), but not the other conditions (p > 0.05). Better visual emotion recognition in CI users coincided with older age, better speech in noise ability, and more positive friendship quality. Significant performance differences with 80% emotion intensity suggest the CI group processes facial expressions qualitatively differently from TH peers, which has implications for therapeutic intervention for social skills in CI users.