Sociocognition Issues Affecting the Working Relationship between the Deaf Professional and the Interpreter

The focus of this paper is to review the literature on socio-cognition issues for deaf graduate students and professionals working with interpreters in order to assess its usefulness in developing key conditions under which deaf graduate student/professional- interpreterworkingrelationshipsmightbeimplementedmoreeffectively. Theories on cognitive dissonance and stereotyping will be examined in relation to their possible implications in the working relationship, and included in this review if they related to the development and maintenance of an ongoing working relationship between the deaf professional and the interpreter. The concept, cognitive dissonance, will be introduced in this discussion and examined for its relevance to the inconsistency between attitudes and behaviors that emerge in the deaf professional or the interpreter as they enter the working relationship. This paper may provide insights into the mechanisms of developing an ongoing working relationship which may guide development of advanced or specialized interpreter training programs

Social Media Use and HIV Screening Uptake Among Deaf Adults in the United States: Cross-Sectional Survey Study

BACKGROUND: About 46% of US adults obtain recommended HIV screening at least once during their lifetime. There is little knowledge of screening rates among deaf and hard-of-hearing adults who primarily use American Sign Language (ASL), or of social media as a potentially efficacious route for HIV prevention outreach, despite lower HIV/AIDS-specific health literacy and potentially higher HIV seropositivity rates than hearing peers. OBJECTIVE: We investigated both the likelihood of HIV screening uptake among deaf adults in the past year and over one year ago, and the relationship between social media use and HIV screening uptake among deaf adult ASL users. METHODS: The Health Information National Trends Survey in ASL was administered to 1340 deaf US adults between 2015-2018. Modified Poisson with robust standard errors was used to assess the relationship between social media usage as a predictor and HIV screening as an outcome (screened more than one year ago, screened within the past year, and never been screened), after adjusting for sociodemographics and sexually transmitted disease (STD) covariates. RESULTS: The estimated lifetime prevalence of HIV screening uptake among our sample was 54% (719/1340), with 32% (429/1340) in the past year. Being of younger age, male gender, black, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, or having some college education or a prior STD were associated with HIV screening uptake. Adjusting for correlates, social media use was significantly associated with HIV screening in the past year, compared to either lifetime or never. CONCLUSIONS: Screening falls well short of universal screening targets, with gaps among heterosexual, female, Caucasian, or older deaf adults. HIV screening outreach may not be effective because of technological or linguistic inaccessibility, rendering ASL users an underrecognized minority group. However, social media is still a powerful tool, particularly among younger deaf adults at risk for HIV

Levels of Emotion Valence and Arousal in American Sign Language

The Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) scale is a widely used instrument for valence and arousal response in English. A person whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL) might process the English emotion words differently. We hypothesized that ASL users might provide different valence and arousal ratings for emotion words in ASL, and a separate normative database might be necessary for this population. Forty-two Deaf adult signers completed ratings for the English and ASL conditions. Results showed that the rating for the arousal were similar for both conditions. However, the valence ratings were different, which could be explained by the different word frequency among the ASL users. This raises a need to create a separate valence rating normative database in ASL

Insights from U.S. deaf patients: Interpreters’ presence and receptive skills matter in patient-centered communication care

In the U.S., deaf individuals who use sign language have a legislated right to communication access in the healthcare system, which is often addressed through the provision of signed language interpreters. However, little is known about deaf patients’ perception of interpreter presence, its impact on their disclosure of medical information to physicians, and whether this perception affects their assessment of physicians’ patient-centered communication behaviors (PCC). A total of 811 deaf adults responded to questions on a bilingual ASL-English online survey about their experiences with interpreters and physicians. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the relationship between deaf patients’ perception of interpreters’ presence with disclosure of medical information and deaf patients’ ratings of their physicians’ patient-centered communication behaviors. The majority of deaf respondents reported feeling that an interpreter’s presence does not interfere with disclosure of medical information to their provider; however, approximately 27% responded that an interpreter’s presence does interfere with their disclosure of medical information. After controlling for correlates of physicians’ patient-centered communication behaviors, the negative perception of interpreters’ presence was associated with 1) low ratings of interpreters’ ability to understand their signed communication, and 2) low ratings of physicians’ patient-centered communication behaviors. Deaf patients’ perception of interpreters’ interference with disclosure of medical information to physicians has implications for trust relationships between the deaf patient and the interpreter, as well as between the deaf patient and physician. Understanding the importance of establishing trust in interpreter-mediated healthcare encounters may foster additional training of interpreters’ receptive skills and inform physician’s patient-centered care for deaf patients

Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches

Children acquire language without instruction as long as they are regularly and meaningfully engaged with an accessible human language. Today, 80% of children born deaf in the developed world are implanted with cochlear devices that allow some of them access to sound in their early years, which helps them to develop speech. However, because of brain plasticity changes during early childhood, children who have not acquired a first language in the early years might never be completely fluent in any language. If they miss this critical period for exposure to a natural language, their subsequent development of the cognitive activities that rely on a solid first language might be underdeveloped, such as literacy, memory organization, and number manipulation. An alternative to speech-exclusive approaches to language acquisition exists in the use of sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), where acquiring a sign language is subject to the same time constraints of spoken language development. Unfortunately, so far, these alternatives are caught up in an "either - or" dilemma, leading to a highly polarized conflict about which system families should choose for their children, with little tolerance for alternatives by either side of the debate and widespread misinformation about the evidence and implications for or against either approach. The success rate with cochlear implants is highly variable. This issue is still debated, and as far as we know, there are no reliable predictors for success with implants. Yet families are often advised not to expose their child to sign language. Here absolute positions based on ideology create pressures for parents that might jeopardize the real developmental needs of deaf children. What we do know is that cochlear implants do not offer accessible language to many deaf children. By the time it is clear that the deaf child is not acquiring spoken language with cochlear devices, it might already be past the critical period, and the child runs the risk of becoming linguistically deprived. Linguistic deprivation constitutes multiple personal harms as well as harms to society (in terms of costs to our medical systems and in loss of potential productive societal participation)

Health Websites: Accessibility and Usability for American Sign Language Users

To date, there have been efforts towards creating better health information access for Deaf American Sign Language (ASL) users. However, the usability of websites with access to health information in ASL has not been evaluated. Our paper focuses on the usability of four health websites that include ASL videos. We seek to obtain ASL users’ perspectives on the navigation of these ASL-accessible websites, finding the health information that they needed, and perceived ease of understanding ASL video content. ASL users (N=32) were instructed to find specific information on four ASL-accessible websites, and answered questions related to: 1) navigation to find the task, 2) website usability, and 3) ease of understanding ASL video content for each of the four websites. Participants also gave feedback on what they would like to see in an ASL health library website, including the benefit of added captioning and/or signer model to medical illustration of health videos. Participants who had lower health literacy had greater difficulty in finding information on ASL-accessible health websites. This paper also describes the participants’ preferences for an ideal ASL-accessible health website, and concludes with a discussion on the role of accessible websites in promoting health literacy in ASL users

Sociocognition Issues Affecting the Working Relationship between the Deaf Professional and the Interpreter

The focus of this paper is to review the literature on socio-cognition issues for deaf graduate students and professionals working with interpreters in order to assess its usefulness in developing key conditions under which deaf graduate student/professional- interpreterworkingrelationshipsmightbeimplementedmoreeffectively. Theories on cognitive dissonance and stereotyping will be examined in relation to their possible implications in the working relationship, and included in this review if they related to the development and maintenance of an ongoing working relationship between the deaf professional and the interpreter. The concept, cognitive dissonance, will be introduced in this discussion and examined for its relevance to the inconsistency between attitudes and behaviors that emerge in the deaf professional or the interpreter as they enter the working relationship. This paper may provide insights into the mechanisms of developing an ongoing working relationship which may guide development of advanced or specialized interpreter training programs