“Are you actually angry or are you kidding?” I asked my husband recently. His posture and facial expression read angry, but it was not the type of situation that called for this emotion. I was confused. It turned out he was joking, but I was missing the subtle cues in his voice. This has been known to happen with my children as well, and close friends, and when I thought about it, probably with other people too — maybe even perfect strangers. Was this somehow related to my hearing loss?
The Emotional Cues In Speech Can Be Harder To Hear
An interesting study published in Canadian Acoustics shows that people with hearing loss do often struggle with the emotional content in speech, even when using hearing aids. The study looked at the impact of hearing aids on the ability of adults with hearing loss to (1) understand the spoken word and (2) to ascertain the emotional state of the speaker. An excerpt from the study abstract explains the methodology and findings.
Listeners were hearing aid users who were tested with and without their aids in separate sessions. They heard sentences spoken by a young female actor portraying different vocal emotions, and were asked to report the keyword and identify the portrayed emotion. The use of hearing aids improved listeners’ word recognition performance from 43% correct (unaided) to 68% correct (aided). In contrast, hearing aids did not improve listeners’ emotion identification (38% unaided, compared to 40% aided).
In other words, people with hearing loss, even when aided, have a more difficult time picking up the emotional content of speech than people with normal hearing do.
Why Are Emotional Cues in Speech Hard to Detect?
After reading the study, I was curious why this might be the case? Was it related to the way that hearing aids compress sound to improve speech intelligibility? Or maybe it was due to the significant listening effort required by people with hearing loss? Amid the concentration required to make sense of the sounds that we hear and the clues we get from lipreading, little brain power may be left over to focus on the emotional content of the communication. Listening fatigue can also make it harder for people with hearing loss to remember the things that they hear.
Missing or misreading the emotional content in speech can make it more challenging to build and maintain strong human relationships. It can lead to stilted conversations and misunderstandings. This is a big problem that we and our communication partners must find a way to overcome.
Misinterpreting emotional cues can also be dangerous. Imagine a dating situation where one partner is having trouble understanding the interest level of the other or an argument with a stranger that turns heated too quickly because the level of anger is hard to determine.
Being More Attuned to the Emotional Content in Speech
Now that we know about this problem, what can we do to counteract this tendency? Here are my suggestions. Please share yours in the comments.
1. Use communication best practices. This lowers listening effort and the resulting hearing loss exhaustion, reserving brain power for the important task of absorbing the emotional content in speech in addition to hearing the actual words spoken.
2. Speechread. Speechreading helps you “see” certain sounds on the lips, making it easier to determine what is being said. It can also help you pick up on emotional content using facial expressions and body language.
3. Adjust your hearing aid settings. Ask your audiologist if there are any adjustments that can be made to your hearing aids to help you engage with emotional content. Hearing aids may not have the capability today, but the more we ask for this feature, the more likely it will become a reality.
4. Clarify emotional state when unclear. Just like we can repeat what we hear to check accuracy, we can do the same with emotional content. If you are unclear about someone’s intent or mood, ask them. It may seem awkward, but when asked the right way, it can be seen as a sign of caring which enhances the effectiveness of the conversation for both sides.
5. Discuss the issue with your family & friends. Making them aware of the issue may help to limit some misunderstandings that arise if you react strangely to something they are saying. Mis-hearings can sometimes be funny, but misreading emotional intent can be hurtful. Being aware that this is a possibility is the first step in minimizing its impact.
Readers, do you ever miss emotional cues in spoken language?
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I am so, so grateful for this particular blog! I’ve often blamed my cluelessness about the emotional content of a conversation on my introverted personality. That IS part of the problem, but this gives me so much help and reduces my level of shame. All of your blogs are worth reading but once in a while, you change my life. Thank you so much!
So glad you found it helpful. Sharing our experiences with one another is critical for all of us with hearing loss.
Yes this is so true, but I also believe it causes others miss understanding us too. They believe we just are not listening to them when we do not even know they are talking to us or in some case we do not even know they are talking. Too many now days refuse to look at you before talking and even talk to your back or as they are walking away from you. I find this so true even for my family that knows that I have hearing loss. People think they are too busy to take the time to really talk to the person they are talking to.
Communication is a two way street. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I have actually found that one of the side effects of long term hearing loss has been the heightened ability to ascertain body language and expression. It is almost as if a person is giving off a “vibe”, so that even if I am not hearing all of the inflection in a voice, the subtle physical signs and expressions that they make often appear as big print to me and enhance comprehension on an intuitive level. Discomfort, dishonesty, joy, sympathy, boredom…. I wonder if anyone else experiences this…
Interesting point. Thanks for sharing this perspective.
Oh,!!! I miss read people all the time! I went deaf about 6 years ago, communication is an issue for me because people don’t always look at you when talking, so lots of mixed emotions,because I don’t often get what’s being said , or how the person that’s talking to me is feeling! So hard!!
It is hard. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I remember a few times when, I asked my wife why she’s mad at me. Often times she just wanted to get my attention to talk about stuff. Many times fun stuff she wanted to do together. Restaurant, movie, trip. Not understanding she’s not mad, sometimes dampens the fun.
It is good to be aware of it at least. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Great article Shari, very thought-provoking. I like to think I’ve gotten better at reading emotions after so many years of hearing loss and intensive speech-reading. But who knows? Unless I actually ask, I may not be interpreting correctly.
Hopefully we do learn with time and with better accessibility devices to lighten the listening effort. Thanks for your comment.
Thank you for this article. I never consciously thought of my hearing impairment causing me to misread emotion. But after reading your post, ding, ding! Eye opener! My family, well they’re my family and nothing will get them to change so I just deal with them. But I find at the office I am constantly having to pause, take a breath and reevaluate interactions with co-workers that I thought were tense or argumentative. In truth, they were either concerned, questioning or tense but not at me. In a group situation I have to pay attention to who the comment is directed to and that is sometimes difficult to do. The reality of being hearing impaired or deaf is that it’s always going to take a lot of effort on our part to fully immerse ourselves in the hearing world. But it’s so much easier today than 50 years ago!
And things are improving all the time. As the listening effort goes down, we will have more energy for the nuances of any communication. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.