title: Sad and happy emotion discrimination in music by children with cochlear implants.
abstract: Children using cochlear implants (CIs) develop speech perception but have difficulty perceiving complex acoustic signals. Mode and tempo are the two components used to recognize emotion in music. Based on CI limitations, we hypothesized children using CIs would have impaired perception of mode cues relative to their normal hearing peers and would rely more heavily on tempo cues to distinguish happy from sad music. Study participants were children with 13 right CIs and 3 left CIs (M = 12.7, SD = 2.6 years) and 16 normal hearing peers. Participants judged 96 brief piano excerpts from the classical genre as happy or sad in a forced-choice task. Music was randomly presented with alterations of transposed mode, tempo, or both. When music was presented in original form, children using CIs discriminated between happy and sad music with accuracy well above chance levels (87.5%) but significantly below those with normal hearing (98%). The CI group primarily used tempo cues, whereas normal hearing children relied more on mode cues. Transposing both mode and tempo cues in the same musical excerpt obliterated cues to emotion for both groups. Children using CIs showed significantly slower response times across all conditions. Children using CIs use tempo cues to discriminate happy versus sad music reflecting a very different hearing strategy than their normal hearing peers. Slower reaction times by children using CIs indicate that they found the task more difficult and support the possibility that they require different strategies to process emotion in music than normal.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Otolaryngology, Cochlear Implant Program , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|b Program in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Research Institute , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Talar
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hopyan
authors.affiliation: a Department of Otolaryngology, Cochlear Implant Program , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|b Program in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Research Institute , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|c Institute of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine , University of Toronto , Toronto , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Francis A M
authors.initials: FA
authors.lastname: Manno
authors.affiliation: a Department of Otolaryngology, Cochlear Implant Program , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|b Program in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Research Institute , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|c Institute of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine , University of Toronto , Toronto , ON , Canada.|d Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery , University of Toronto , Toronto , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Blake C
authors.initials: BC
authors.lastname: Papsin
authors.affiliation: a Department of Otolaryngology, Cochlear Implant Program , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|b Program in Neurosciences and Mental Health, Research Institute , The Hospital for Sick Children , Toronto , ON , Canada.|c Institute of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine , University of Toronto , Toronto , ON , Canada.|d Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery , University of Toronto , Toronto , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Karen A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Gordon
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D010898:Pitch Perception; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: Cochlear Implants; Emotion; Music; Perception; Prosody