Individually Optimized Hearing Aid Sound Improves Daily Mood and Well-Being

The useful part

This further reinforces the importance of choosing hearing aids with good sound quality and of individualizing the sound to the individual wearer, in order to improve their mood and well-being. As clinicians, we often focus on audibility and intelligibility for our clients since treatment is meaningless without achieving these. At the same time, it is important to hearing loss and hearing aids affect a much broader range of areas of life than 'just' what a person with hearing loss can hear and understand.

How it works

• Events shape moods, which shape well-being—a phenomenon both intuitively relatable and backed by research.
• 4,5 Audiological research on moods has focused mostly on fatigue, especially listening-related fatigue as the result of sustained listening effort.
• The models also tested a range of predictor variables, both control variables and variables relating to the key hypotheses concerning sound quality and mood.
• Second, the analysis of the daily ratings also showed better mood during the period where participants wore their Good program.
• The figure shows significantly better mood for participants with consistent preferences wearing their Good settings.

What to take from it

One important effect of hearing loss is the risk of reduced well-being, both mentally and physically. This question is important because sound quality is a main factor in hearing aid satisfaction 12,13,14 and in hearing aid design 15,16,17, and a relationship between sound quality and mood may be part of the reason why. They were aged between 51 and 80 years (median = 74, SD = 6.2) and all had mild to moderately severe bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, with a better-ear mean four-frequency pure-tone average of 40.0 dB HL (SD = 8.9).

Example or evidence

• Half the sample started with their Good and half with their Tolerable settings.
• Both direct and indirect effects of hearing loss may have broad and deep influences on people's lives.
• 1,2,3 One contributor to this may be moods: affective states that are transient but persist for some time, such as experiences of fatigue, satisfaction, or vigor.
• While moods are typically less intense than emotional responses to specific occurrences, they remain important mediators between what happens in a person's life and their general well-being.

Details worth keeping

In a recent study, we found that hearing aid sound quality also affects the daily moods of hearing aid wearers, who showed improved ratings of fatigue, vigor, and esteem-related affect when wearing hearing aids with individually optimized sound quality. 6,7,8 For the individual person with hearing loss, feelings of listening-related fatigue may be increased by their actual hearing loss, but are likely more influenced by perceived hearing difficulties. 9 to fatigue, both general and listening-related, it is also interesting to consider moods more broadly.

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