PROCEEDINGS of the23rd International Congress on Acoustics
9 to 13 September 2019 in Aachen, Germany

Pupillary Correlates of Auditory Emotion Recognition in Older
Hearing-Impaired Listeners
Julie KIRWAN12; Anita WAGNER12; Deniz BASKENT12
1University Medical Center Groningen, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Groningen, Netherlands
2University of Groningen, Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences, Groningen, Netherlands

ABSTRACTHearing-impaired (HI) individuals are shown to perform worse in auditory emotion recognition tasks
compared to normal hearing individuals. It is still unclear if this is due to processing at low auditory levels or
to categorisation of emotions that are involved in an experimental task (1). An index of emotion recognition
can be observed in pupil dilations, which have recently been shown to dilate more for emotionally
meaningful speech in comparison to emotionally neutral speech (2). We fitted 8 older HI participants, whohad moderate to severe sloping high-frequency hearing loss, with frequency lowering enabled hearing aids
for an acclimatisation period of 3-6 weeks. We recorded their pupil dilations in response to emotional speechwith and without frequency lowering, during a passive-listening condition, both before and after theacclimatisation period. We also recorded their pupil dilations during an active-listening condition, which
included a behavioural emotion identification task, after the acclimatisation period. We present here insights
into the pupillary correlates of vocal emotion recognition in the HI population and the impact of frequency
lowering and the cognitive involvement elicited by the experimental situation on pupil dilation and emotion
recognition capabilities in this population.
Keywords: Emotion, Pupillometry, Emotion recognition, Hearing-impaired, Frequency Lowering

1. RESULTS

Figure 1 – Aggregated Event-Related-Pupil-Dilation (ERPD) plot for the passive-listening condition. The
onset of the stimulus occurs at 0 ms.

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Figure 1 – Aggregated Event-Related-Pupil-Dilation (ERPD) plot for the active-listening condition. The
onset of the stimulus occurs at 0 ms.

DISCUSSION
The communication of emotion is an essential part of our daily interaction, and recognising emotions
can elicit a reaction in the observer, such as the well-known fight or flight response. Pupil dilations
have been demonstrated to dilate more for emotional in comparison to neutral stimuli across several
stimulus types, including pictures, environmental sounds, music, and, more recently, speech (2,3,4,5).
The pupillary response has also been shown to illustrate mental effort, attention, and other cognitive
processes (6,7,8). Therefore, in order to investigate the nature of the pupillary response in response toemotional speech stimuli, we tested both a passive and active listening condition. The results for thepassive-listening condition reflect the appearance of specific pupillary profiles for different emotional
stimuli, whereas this appears much less defined in the active-listening condition. This could suggestthat both emotional and cognitive processing affect pupil dilation and this can be shown in an older HI
population.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to acknowledge Julia Rehmann and Peter Derleth of Sonova AG,
Laubisruetistrasse 28, 8712 Staefa, Switzerland.

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