Socially-Based Emotion Dysregulation Among Hearing-Impaired Adolescents: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Résumé

PURPOSE: Hearing impairment adversely affects the development and maturation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region critical for social emotion regulation. The present study aimed to examine how hearing impairment influences socially-based emotion regulation in adolescents or its underlying neural mechanisms.METHOD: To address this gap, the present study recorded event-related potentials (ERP) while participants viewed images depicting social exclusion or used emotion regulation strategies to down-regulate their emotional responses.FINDING: Behavioral results indicated that normal-hearing adolescents reported a significant reduction in negative affect when employing regulation strategies, an effect not observed in hearing-impaired adolescents. ERP data indicated that compared to passive viewing, expressive suppression elicited reduced amplitudes in the central-parietal LPP and P3 components among normal-hearing adolescents. This modulation was attenuated in those with hearing impairment.CONCLUSION: These results suggest that deficits in both attention allocation and elaborative emotional processing may underlie the impaired down-regulation of socially triggered negative emotions in adolescents with hearing loss.