Pupillary correlates of auditory emotion recognition in older hearing-impaired listeners

Hearing-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, who had 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 speech with and without frequency lowering, during a passive-listening condition, both before and after the acclimatisation 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.