Article summary of Hearing status affects children's emotion understanding in dynamic social situations: An eye-tracking study. Ear and Hearing by Tsou, Kret et al. - Chapter

What is emotion socialization?

Emotion socialization refers to the idea that children learn to understand, express and self-regulate emotions in social contexts. This process already starts in the first days of life. Experiencing a lower quantity and quality of social interaction with meaningful others during early childhood can negatively affect children's emotion socialization. For children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), a vicious cycle can be created in which poor emotion socialization leads to less social participation, which hinders even more their emotion socialization.

What is the social information processing model?

This model proposes that, when people enter a social situation, they rely on past experiences and process social information in six steps:

• People encode emotional information by focusing their attention on relevant cues.

• People interpret emotional information according to the cues that are encoded.

• People formulate goals that they want to achieve in the situation.

• People generate response alternatives to the situation.

• People evaluate the alternatives to make a decision.

• People enact the most favorable response.

How can hearing status influence emotion understanding in social situations?

The skill of emotion understanding cannot develop without access to the social context in which emotions occur. In a social environment that features spoken communication, children that are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) don´t access the social environment in the same way as the typically hearing children. Especially the encoding stage functions as a filter through which people collect the most relevant emotional cues for subsequent processing. Not being able to hear the sound or tone of the social environment may lead to incorrect interpretations of people's intentions and feelings. It is possible that DHH children experience difficulties with emotion understanding as a result of a different encoding pattern.

Why do Tsou et. al. (2021) also use eye-tracking to study emotion understanding in DHH children?

The head region of others is an important cue to which people most often direct their attention when processing social situations. Even when facial expressions can´t be seen clearly, the head region is important because its angle, orientation, and movement provide information about the emotions and attention of other people. As a strategy to compensate for limited auditory input, DHH children may collect visual cues in a different way from typically hearing children. By using eye-tracking the researchers are able to see if perhaps the DHH children give more weight to body cues than to the head itself, or if they distribute their attention equally to the eye and mouth regions (whereas typically hearing individuals look mostly to the eyes).

How did DHH children differ from typically hearing children when trying to understand nonverbal emotional cues in dynamic social situations?

In the dynamic social situations, an interaction partner elicited an emotion in a target person. The DHH children spent less time looking at the target person's head and more time looking at the target person's body and at the partner´s head. The DHH children scored lower than the typically hearing children when interpreting emotions, and these lower scores were associated with their distinctive encoding pattern of spending less time looking at the target person's head and more time looking at the target person's body. With increased age, children attended to the relevant emotional cues longer and interpreted situations with the emotion intended more often.

What do the authors think may be the reason that DHH children spent less time looking at the head regions?

The DHH children may have found the head region less informative when facial cues were missing and so they reduced their attention to the head region and increased their attention to other cues that could give more information about the situation. Other visually observable cues may be able to compensate for ambiguous information. For example, a movement backwards could indicate fear, or moving forward could indicate anger.