A test of emotion discrimination for hearing impaired and normal hearing children

A Test of Emotion Discrimination (TED) was constructed to measure the ability of ten hearing impaired children (trained in the Verbo Tonal method) and ten matched normal hearing children to discriminate among four primary emotions through listening. The TED consisted of 20 test items. Each pre-recorded sentence was spoken with one of four simulated emotions: (1) anger, (2) sorrow, (3) joy, or (4) fear. The children listened to the sentence and pointed to one of the four photographs simulating the same emotion. The TED is a reliable test. The normal hearing children scored significantly better than the hearing impaired children. "Anger" was the best identified emotion while "fear" was the most difficult to identify for both groups. The normal hearing children scored significantly better on "joy" than the hearing impaired children, but did approximately the same on "sorrow." The socioeconomic background of the hearing impaired children seemed more important in the development of listening skills than for the normal hearing child. The ability of the hearing impaired children to discriminate among the four emotions may be related to their level of oral communication skills.