Hearing AND voices

INTRODUCTION: Remote digital assessments (RDA) such as voice recording, video and motor sensors, olfactory, hearing and vision screenings are now starting to be employed to complement classical biomarker and clinical evidence to identify patients in the early AD stages. Choosing which RDA can be proposed to individual patients is not trivial, and often time consuming. This position paper presents a decision-making algorithm for using RDA during teleconsultations in memory clinic settings...

PURPOSE: To establish normative values for the OMNI-Vocal Effort Scale (VES) in healthy adults without voice complaints. Secondary objective is to determine if there are differences in perceived vocal effort across age groups and between sexes. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective data collection across groups. METHOD: A nine-item survey was administered by speech-language pathologists with specialization in voice to consenting adults 18 years or older...

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to determine (a) diagnostic accuracy of acoustic measures of glottal stop production (GSP; intensity differences, slopes, complete voicing cessation) to distinguish between unilateral vocal fold paresis/paralysis (UVFP) patients and controls; (b) if acoustic measures of GSP significantly correlated with an acoustic measure of voice disorder severity, acoustic voice quality index (AVQI); and (c) if acoustic measures from another type of voicing cessation, voiceless consonant production, also significantly differed between groups...

Empathy is essential to the development of communication skills. Simulating psychosis to develop empathy for mental health patients is complex; we hypothesized that virtual reality (VR) would be effective in increasing empathy in health care students. This experimental study compared the effectiveness of a VR simulation with a traditional hearing voices simulation as measured by the Kiersma-Chen Empathy Scale-Revised. Twenty-five health care students were randomized into two groups. The results indicated that both simulated experiences increased empathy levels, supporting the study's hypothesis...

BACKGROUND: Auditory perception plays a crucial role in speech and language development, emphasizing concerns about hearing loss. While cochlear implantation (CI) nearly tackles challenges associated with postlingual hearing loss in adults, the importance of "auditory feedback" and acoustic assessment becomes crucial for evaluating speech disorders and devising effective treatments. This study aims to address the gap in assessing Voice Onset Time (VOT) as an indicator of nuanced variations in the speech of CI users during a continuous speech task...

Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS) is a rare perceptual disorder characterized mainly by perceptual distortions of visual objects and one's own body. While there are many case reports of visual and somatosensory distortions associated with AIWS, little is known about auditory distortion. Therefore, we present the case of a 22-year-old right-handed woman who described having auditory as well as visual and somatosensory distortion experiences and a family history of AIWS. The subject reported experiencing multisensory perceptual distortions, where she sees other people's faces as larger and hears their voices as louder at the same time...

PURPOSE: To assess hospitalized children's satisfaction with nursing care. DESIGN AND METHODS: Cross-sectional study using the "Children Care Quality at Hospital" questionnaire. 61 children admitted to the Pediatrics Department of a hospital in the Northern Region of Portugal were enrolled. RESULTS: The ranged age of the participants was 6 to 15 (10,61 ± 2,66 years), and most were male (52.46%; n = 32). The mean score in the three domains was 128 (77...

INTRODUCTION: This study aimed to validate three age-adjusted versions of a Hearing Screening Questionnaire for Preschoolers, in Brazilian Portuguese, based on parents' perception of their children's hearing and oral language. METHODS: Psychometric validation was conducted on three questionnaires, each comprising nine items with Yes/No responses. Three items focused on hearing screening at birth, and six assessed hearing and oral language. The study included 152 parents and their children, who attended day care centers in Belo Horizonte, Brazil...

BACKGROUND: For students to feel happy and supported in school, it is important that their views are taken seriously and integrated into school policies. However, limited information is available how the voices of immigrant students are considered in European school contexts. This study generated evidence from written documents to ascertain how student voice practices are described at school websites. METHODS: Between 2 March and 8 April 2021, we reviewed the policy documents publicly available on school websites...

In much contemporary psychiatric training and practice, there is a strong emphasis on the audible or perceptual quality and externality of auditory verbal hallucinations in clinical assessments. A typical question during clinical assessment is asking whether the voices that a person hears sound identical to the way the clinician's voice is heard. In this Personal View, we argue that the most important factor in auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia spectrum psychoses is a loss of first-person authority, and that a perceptual quality is not required for it to be this kind of hallucination...

Here, we present 3 different perspectives on how the microbiome has impacted cancer patients, treatment, and clinical studies. We hear about the challenges of implementing microbiome analyses into the clinics, the impact these analyses might have on patients' care, and treatment in the future, specifically for gastric cancer treatment. These are a few of the many voices that are highlighting the role of the microbiome in cancer development, treatment, and clinical outcomes.

PURPOSE: To assess the influence of the listener experience, measurement scales and the type of speech task on the auditory-perceptual evaluation of the overall severity (OS) of voice deviation and the predominant type of voice (rough, breathy or strain). METHODS: 22 listeners, divided into four groups participated in the study: speech-language pathologist specialized in voice (SLP-V), SLP non specialized in voice (SLP-NV), graduate students with auditory-perceptual analysis training (GS-T), and graduate students without auditory-perceptual analysis training (GS-U)...

Hearing aids and other hearing devices should provide the user with a benefit, for example, compensate for effects of a hearing loss or cancel undesired sounds. However, wearing hearing devices can also have negative effects on perception, previously demonstrated mostly for spatial hearing, sound quality and the perception of the own voice. When hearing devices are set to transparency, that is, provide no gain and resemble open-ear listening as well as possible, these side effects can be studied in isolation...

PURPOSE: We studied the role of gender in metacognition of voice emotion recognition ability (ERA), reflected by self-rated confidence (SRC). To this end, we guided our study in two approaches: first, by examining the role of gender in voice ERA and SRC independently and second, by looking for gender effects on the ERA association with SRC. METHOD: We asked 100 participants (50 men, 50 women) to interpret a set of vocal expressions portrayed by 30 actors (16 men, 14 women) as defined by their emotional meaning...

PURPOSE: Cisplatin is a low-cost clinical anti-tumor drug widely used to treat solid tumors. However, its use could damage cochlear hair cells, leading to irreversible hearing loss. Currently, there appears one drug approved in clinic only used for reducing ototoxicity associated with cisplatin in pediatric patients, which needs to further explore other candidate drugs. METHODS: Here, by screening 1967 FDA-approved drugs to protect cochlear hair cell line (HEI-OC1) from cisplatin damage, we found that Tedizolid Phosphate (Ted), a drug indicated for the treatment of acute infections, had the best protective effect...

BACKGROUND: Sheep have been proposed as a large-animal model for studying cochlear implantation. However, prior sheep studies report that the facial nerve (FN) obscures the round window membrane (RWM), requiring FN sacrifice or a retrofacial opening to access the middle-ear cavity posterior to the FN for cochlear implantation. We investigated surgical access to the RWM in Hampshire sheep compared to Suffolk-Dorset sheep and the feasibility of Hampshire sheep for cochlear implantation via a facial recess approach...

OBJECTIVES: Postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulties with perceiving differences in speakers' voice characteristics and benefit little from voice differences for the perception of speech in competing speech. However, not much is known yet about the perception and use of voice characteristics in prelingually deaf implanted children with CIs. Unlike CI adults, most CI children became deaf during the acquisition of language. Extensive neuroplastic changes during childhood could make CI children better at using the available acoustic cues than CI adults, or the lack of exposure to a normal acoustic speech signal could make it more difficult for them to learn which acoustic cues they should attend to...

INTRODUCTION: Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) is a speech and language disorder associated with difficulties in motor production, perception, and phonological representation of sounds and speech segments. Since auditory perception has a fundamental role in forming and organizing sound representation for its recognition, studies that evaluate the cortical processing of sounds are required. Thus, the present study aimed to verify the relation between SSD severity measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC) with the cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEP) using speech stimulus...

The advent of COVID-19 prompted the enforced isolation of elderly and vulnerable populations around the world, for their own safety. For people in prison, these restrictions risked compounding the isolation and harm they experienced. At the same time, the pandemic created barriers to prison oversight when it was most needed to ensure that the state upheld the rights and wellbeing of those in custody. This article reports findings from a unique collaboration in Ireland between the Office of the Inspector of Prisons - a national prison oversight body - and academic criminologists...

INTRODUCTION: Emotional contagion is achieved by inferring and emotionally resonating with other persons' feelings. It is unclear whether age-related changes in emotional contagion for infant sounds are modulated by the experience of childbirth or childcare. This study aims to evaluate changes in inference and emotional resonance for positive and negative infant sounds (laughter and crying) among women, based on age and parous experience. METHODS: A total of 241 women (60 young nulliparous, 60 young parous, 60 old nulliparous, and 61 old parous) completed a web-based questionnaire...