Does Wearing Hearing Aids Impact the Affective State of Older Adults With Hearing Loss in Their Daily Lives?

Completed · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Hearing Loss, Hearing Loss, Sensorineural, Emotions, Stress Physiology

In brief

The proposed field trial will clarify the real-world effectiveness of HAs in remediating deficits in emotion processing for older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. This study will employ a repeated reversal design to establish baseline affective state without HAs, when wearing amplification, and after HAs are removed. This study will triangulate self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures to capture nuances of emotional processing in the laboratory and in daily listening. Naturalistic stimuli will be used as it occurs in daily life to elicit emotional experiences, and ecological momentary assessment and commercially-available wearable sensors will be used to track changes in emotional state in daily listening. Anchoring real-world emotional experiences with controlled laboratory experiences will validate wearable sensors. Additionally, laboratory emotional stimuli will be related to real-world emotional experiences to establish the utility of laboratory stimuli in future studies. It is likely that benefits in emotional processing will have differential effects based on individual characteristics (such as degree of hearing loss, age, gender, cognitive ability, and personality), so participants will be analyzed according to larger groupings based on individual differences.

Key facts

Study ID

NCT06249685

Run by

University of Memphis

People needed

35

Starts

2020-07-01

Expected to finish

2022-06-01

Last updated by the study team

2024-02-08

Who can join

Age: 50 and older, up to 85. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: not accepted.

You may qualify if…

• Bilateral, uncomplicated, adult-onset mild-to-moderate hearing loss.
• No previous experience with hearing aids
• Fluent English speakers
• Have adequate literacy and cognitive competence to complete informed consent and required questionnaires with minimal assistance.
• Able to transport themselves to the data collection site and participate in the study without assistance from researchers.

You may not qualify if…

• History of otologic surgery or chronic middle or outer ear pathology
• Evidence of retrocochlear involvement
• Known psychiatric or neurologic disorder.

Where it is running

• University of Memphis — Memphis, Tennessee, United States

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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