Perception of Musical Emotion in the Students with Congenital and Acquired Hearing Loss

ObjectiveHearing loss can affect the perception of emotional reaction to the music.The present study investigated whether the students with congenital hearingloss exposed to the deaf culture, percept the same emotion from the musicas students with acquired hearing loss.Materials & MethodsParticipants were divided into two groups; 30 students with bilaterallycongenital moderate to severe hearing loss that were selected from deafschools located in Tehran, Iran and 30 students with an acquired hearingloss with the same degree of hearing loss selected from Amiralam Hospital,Tehran, Iran and compared with the group of 30 age and gender-matchednormal hearing subjects served our control in 2012. The musical stimuliconsisted of three different sequences of music, (sadness, happiness, andfear) each with the duration of 60 sec. The students were asked to point tothe lists of words that best matched with their emotions.ResultsEmotional perception of sadness, happiness, and fear in congenital hearingloss children was significantly poorly than acquired hearing loss andnormal hearing group (P<0.001). There was no significant difference inthe emotional perception of sadness, happiness, and fear among the groupof acquired hearing loss and normal hearing group (P=0.75), (P=1) and(P=0.16) respectively.ConclusionNeural plasticity induced by hearing assistant devises may be affectedby the time when a hearing aid was first fitted and how the auditorysystem responds to the reintroduction of certain sounds via amplification.Therefore, children who experienced auditory input of different soundpatterns in their early childhood will show more perceptual flexibility indifferent situations than the children with congenital hearing loss and Deafcultur