The Analysis of Emotion Recognition Skills of Children with Cochlear Implants from Facial Expressions and Scenarios

Abstract

Objectives: In our cross-sectional research study, the emotion-recognition ability of cochlear-implanted (CI) children is compared to that of normally-hearing (NH) children between four and six years old. For this purpose, thirty (CI) children and thirty NH children were assessed. Materials and Methods: The emotion recognition abilities of each child were evaluated with two tasks. In the first task, emotion recognition abilities were assessed by using the facial expressions cards. Children were expected to point out the card which was matching the emotion. Then facial expression cards were shuffled and children were asked to name the emotions from the cards which were shown by the professional. In the second task, emotion recognition abilities from the scenarios were assessed by scenario cards. Five emotion cards were shown to the children and they were asked to point out the emotion card that matching the scenario, and also named the emotion. Results: The results showed that CI children were not able to recognize the five emotion from the two-dimensional stimuli as well as NH children. Even if CI children had similar language scores with typically developing children, they had difficulties mostly in recalling and expressing emotion words. The most easily recognized emotions were sad and happy in both groups. Conclusion: Our findings support other studies in the literature and aimed to increase awareness for emotion recognition abilities of children, which may promote the establishment of appropriate training programs to improve emotion recognition abilities of children with hearing loss. Emotion recognition tasks should be included in the training programs from early ages, because these abilities are supported children’s communication skills, especially children with hearing loss.

Keywords

• cochlear implants
• children
• emotion recognition