Investigations of the Links between Stigma Related to Aging and Hearing loss: Effects on Social Interactions and Health Behaviours
Kathy Pichora-Fuller, Alison Chasteen, Gurjit Singh, Sherri Smith
Age-related hearing loss begins in the fourth decade and increases with age; it affects about half of the population by the age of 75 years and is the third most common chronic disability. Hearing is crucial to spoken communication. Communication is essential to our quality of life and health. Its loss can generate feelings of isolation, powerlessness, depression, paranoia, and withdrawal from social interaction. Moreover, communication is a key factor in population health and it has been related to longevity and years lived without disability. Despite impressive technological advances, many older adults still do not pursue rehabilitative options that could ameliorate hearing problems. Our study is designed to find ways to help people with hearing loss get over the stigma related to wearing hearing aids.
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Emotion and word identification by older listeners with hearing aids
M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller1,2, Gurjit Singh2,3, Frank Russo4, Huiwen Goy1, Kate Dupuis5
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 2Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, 3Phonak, 4Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, 5Rotman Research Institute
One important type of information that listeners obtain from the speech signal is the emotional state of the talker. Hearing aids process speech in a way that makes soft sounds louder and shifts sound energy into frequency regions that a hearing aid user is able to hear. While such processing may make speech easier to understand for a listener with hearing loss, it may at the same time alter the speech signal in a way that makes emotion in speech more difficult to perceive. The purpose of this study is to investigate how well listeners who use hearing aids are able to identify emotion in speech, and to compare that ability to listeners’ ability to identify which words were spoken. Listeners will be older adults who are hearing aid users, and they will be asked to identify keywords in sentences that are presented to them, and also to identify the emotion that is portrayed by the talker. Listeners will complete this task with and without their hearing aids to measure how their hearing aids affect performance.
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Relationships of Cognitive, Motor, and Sensory Abilities to Everyday Activities of older Adults
M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller1,2, Jennifer Campos2
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 2Toronto Rehabilitation Institute
The purpose of this study is to investigate any relationships between auditory, visual, cognitive, and movement ability and everyday activities. Listeners will be healthy older adults, and they will be asked to complete a battery of self-report questionnaires providing relevant demographic information, indicating hearing aid use, indicating confidence in auditory ability, indicating amount of socialization currently engaged in, providing information of everyday activities, and indicating confidence on balance ability. The balance and measures involve participants performing simple motor tasks, such as walking around an obstacle, turning in place, and standing and walking from a seated position. The visual acuity test will consist of reading letters off of a standard eye chart from a fixed distance until the letters become too small to see. The auditory assessment will include testing of hearing thresholds where the participant responds to the softest sounds they are capable of hearing as well as repeating words presented with conflicting auditory input. The battery of cognitive measures will consist of standard cognitive tests designed to assess mild cognitive impairment, mostly through timed cognitive tasks. Within-participant analyses will explore relationships between these variables.
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